Laid up in bed with a stinker of a cold, I took the opportunity to join the rest of the English speaking world, and binge-watched Adolescence.
It’s very good indeed, and the hype is well-deserved. It’s well-written, phenomenally well-acted (Stephen Graham can do no wrong in my eyes, but everybody else is brilliant, too) and the way each episode is filmed in a single take is completely mind-blowing! 🤯
It’s also very sad, and I cried at the end, as I’m sure you did/will, too.
But I didn’t find it all that shocking. It all made total sense to me, as did the actions of each of the characters.
They were all playing out their scripts, figuratively and literally, as we all are (and that’s where the heartbreak came in – such loving parents, consciously going out of their way to overcome generational trauma… and yet this 😱💔)
But here’s the thing.
It would be very easy to watch it and conclude that to prevent these sorts of things from happening:
- We need to ban smartphones
- We need tighter regulation on social media
- Certain ‘bad actors’ in the ‘manosphere’ need de-platforming
- Parents need to be better educated about the inherent dangers
- Kids shouldn’t be left alone in their rooms with phones, unsupervised
…and loads of other measures along those lines.
Now, I actually think most of those are pretty good ideas, and I support them, but they’re not the actual problem
None of them are the real reason Jamie did what he did.