What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong - William Costello - #924

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Is Adolescence a bit too real?

**William Costello** (0:03)
So Adolescence is this Netflix show that's absolutely blowing up and getting crazy amounts of attention at the moment. It's on track to become Netflix most watched miniseries of all time, and that's just within a couple of weeks. So it's really capturing public attention. And one caller into a radio station that I heard from England this morning, said that it just, it hits home too much. It's a little too real. And this kind of left me floundering a little bit because, okay, you know, creative people who are making a show, I'm not going to hold their feet to the fire. They have creative license. They can make a show and depict whatever they want. But we just need to hit pause a second, because if this show is prompting roundtable discussions with parliament, with the prime minister, which it has, and the parliament are going to fund this show being shown to every student in the UK throughout the next couple of months, all within a couple of weeks of it airing, by the way, then I think we're entitled to maybe scrutinize the realism or the realistic nature of the show or how much it depicts accurately the problem it's talking about. On that front then, you can ask the question, how realistic is this problem? Let me just be very clear. There is no epidemic of Manosphere-inspired violence like depicted in the show. Unlike, however, the epidemic of knife violence, which is a very real phenomenon and perhaps is more tightly tied to drill music, for example. That is a very real problem. On that front, it absolutely is not realistic of the problem it's painting. I commented that the show depicts a plausible narrative of how a tragedy like this might unfold. I stress the word might there because there has been no tragedy like the show depicts. There has been-

**Chris Williamson** (2:00)
A fictional boy stabbing a fictional girl in a fictional series.

**William Costello** (2:03)
There has been no 13-year-old white kid who's getting good grades in school, not causing much trouble, suddenly going and stabbing a girl.

**Chris Williamson** (2:12)
Because of, exclusively because of, in-cell Manosphere content coming from a good family, blah, blah, blah.

**William Costello** (2:17)
Exactly. When I say that the show depicts something plausible, here's what I mean. Instead of depicting a cold-blooded psychopathic killer, and it's up for debate whether Jamie, the boy in the show, is meant to be depicted as a psychopath. I tend to think no, but there may be some reason to think yes. But it doesn't depict this cold-blooded, calculated killer who's- and the show doesn't claim to have a straight line answer that it definitely was the Manosphere influence that made this happen. It kind of skillfully, I think, presents a couple of potentially contributing factors. In any case, it presents a young boy, Jamie, who's depicted as being very insecure about giving the impression to others that he's sexually successful. That's kind of recognizable to a lot of sexually developing young males. That's a big concern of theirs and that's how you derogate other rival males. Young men always derogate each other in that way.
He has his masculinity challenged by the girl he ends up killing, actually. I should say spoiler alert. But I think everyone in the world has seen this show by now. So the girl he ends up killing, I think it was actually bold of the creators of the show, the writers, to write in that she was bullying him online, calling him an incel. I thought that was important because it shows that whether or not you buy into being an incel at age 13, I mean, every 13-year-old boy is probably an incel. But whether or not you've bought into the ideology, it depicts that this being on the table as an insult kind of affects you. And the pressure that Jamie feels to present himself as sexually successful is probably exacerbated by consuming Manosphere content, right? Incel is the insult of choice. It depicts that social media exacerbates this problem even further because he can see hundreds of classmates liking her comment. It also depicts that he kind of clumsily came upon a knife, which is fairly realistic and maybe it wouldn't find its way into the hands of a 13-year-old white well-raised kid. But there are a lot of knives on the ground in England at the moment, and he happened to find in his possession a knife. He didn't intend to, well, as far as my reading of the show goes, he didn't intend to go out and kill the girl. He intended to confront her about this challenge, this insult to his masculinity, and having the knife, things got way out of hand. That's what I mean when I say it's plausible. But in terms of a depiction of the epidemic of knife violence in the UK, which is specifically what the writers of the show have spoke about. In interviews where they talk about what inspired the show, they talk about two specific instances, and then they go on to talk about the epidemic of knife violence. On that front, it's not representative of prototypical knife violence in the UK. To bring in the racial demographics as well, it's not typical of the scale of the Manosphere problem. Like I say, there's never been a killing like this. There's been one killing with Jake Davison that's loosely tied to incel ideology, very different in nature to what's depicted in adolescence. And in terms of Manosphere fans, it's also not really representative because ethnic minorities are actually way overrepresented in their admiration of Manosphere guys.