Adolescence: The Netflix drama that will have every parent talking - Join our watch thread plus Q&A with producer and cast

[CeriMumsnet]

Premieres 13th March 2025

Read Hannah and Christine's answers to your questions here.

If you’re after a gripping new series to get stuck into, Adolescence is set to be the show of the year - and it’s one that will chill parents to the core. This tense British crime drama begins with the shocking arrest of 13-year-old Jamie Miller for the murder of a classmate. But as the investigation unfolds, the series delves into the unsettling realities of modern masculinity, online radicalisation, and the pressures facing today’s teenagers.

Filmed in South Kirby with a raw, unflinching realism, Adolescence isn’t just another crime drama - it’s a conversation starter. If you were lucky enough to catch the Mumsnet exclusive preview, you’ll know just how haunting and thought-provoking it is, with themes that resonate long after you finish watching.

Watch the trailer here:

Q&A
Adolescence Executive Producer Hannah Walters and actress Christine Tremarco who plays Jamie’s Mum will be joining us for a Q&A in the next couple of weeks, so make sure to share your questions about the show for them below.

• Hannah Walters is an actress, producer and co-founder of Matriarch Productions, an entertainment production company who aims to provide a much-needed platform for underrepresented voices and stories in the UK. Their credits include BOILING POINT (2021) and most recent TV series for the BBC. Hannah has two children with her husband Stephen Graham.

• Christine Tremarco is a British actress who along with playing Jamie’s Mum in Adolescence can also currently be seen in Channel 4’s drama series, The Gathering and in the BBC’s Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story, directed by Al Mackay. Other screen credits include the BBC’s Responder opposite Martin Freeman, a series regular in Sky’s Wolfe, and Shane Meadows’ BAFTA winning series The Virtues opposite Stephen Graham.

So, what do we think? Will you be watching? Does the premise resonate with you? Let’s chat below! 👇

I think it's unfair to dismiss@ForTealBee because she hasn't/won't watch it. She's talking about what she's seen on social media about the programme, and it appears she's seen a lot of "Well she was bullying him, so she deserved it." comments - blaming the girl for the boy's actions.

Those of us who have watched it know that's not the message intended and the writers lay no blame on the victim however, sadly, the whole thing has been twisted on SM by the sounds of it, to fit with the time honoured tradition of blaming females for male violence. Remember the first rule of misogyny - 'Women are responsible for what men do'. Men will grasp at any straw in these situations to justify their, and other men's, violence, so it's a shame but inevitable that manosphere types will try to twist the message of Adolescence to suit their misogyny.

Proves the very point of the programme if you think about it

Lots of people have very twisted views of their own attractiveness. Adolescents particularly.

How many teenage girls believe themselves to be ugly when they aren't?

It's very easy for any teenager to become convinced of something when their peers are relentless about it and ignorant of the effect they're having.

I haven't seen the film yet, but is it about how males are made to feel hard done by? They'd know what hard done by feels like if they were a woman, and feel scared just walking outside alone at night. I live near nice countryside and would love to go for walks alone or bike rides, but don't because I'm too scared about what some men want to do to me. I'm not saying all men, but men don't have to be scared about the same happening to them by a woman.
Also at one time men were looked up to if they were hero gentlemen types, but nowadays boys are more influenced by USA men spending their time online crying about why it isn't fair women this and that.

100% agree with you.

Honestly, they'll check your okay. I had terrible insomnia from about age 17 so would walk the streets of London, Bristol, Manchester etc at night. If a guy came across me it was always done with genuine concern and they kept their distance while asking if I'm okay.

Yes, if aman chose to rape me I'd be fucked (literally) but the average guy in the UK is a good guy.

I won't encourage you to walk incase something bad happens, but if you did and found out all that happens is some guy walks you back home for "safety" - don't be so surprised. A lot of decent men in the UK (can't say the world)

Absolutely amazing, heartbreaking and hard hitting.
i read somewhere that the pictures of children before each episode, where children who had been killed.
I understood it from the parent’s perspective. And it led to a conversation with my daughter of how me and my partner felt when she was remanded and sent to prison.
Her crime was no way that serious but serious enough.
As a parent you do question the what ifs , feel like you failed. The family too have a sentence. Like when the daughter was saying they shouldn’t move house because it would only follow them.

i understand why Katie was mentioned as much as it was about masculinity and incel culture. If they had mentioned her more, it would have missed the point entirely.

i have no question as most people have covered what i would of asked anyway.

will add , people saying it’s anti white and all that, white boys kill as well. It was based on kids killing kids. Not a particular crime.

Exactly, and added to this, Red Pill/Manosphere also focuses on the fact that women don't want ugly men. He has been rejected by at least one girl he is interested in, he doesn't have a girlfriend, and isn't getting topless photos like other boys. Therefore, it must be because he's ugly, because that's the "truth" of female sexuality according to what he's reading online. In his mind, if he was better looking, girls would like him.

There's a lot of people who have the opinion that 'men and women can't just be friends' particularly if they're married.

Jamie's reaction to the question was very telling. He didn't just say "no" when he was asked if his dad was friendly with other women. He immediately got defensive and jumped to "she must mean is he cheating on my mum" - the concept of her actually asking if his dad was friends with or generally pleasant and friendly to women like it was a normal thing, rather than being something sexual, wasn't even on his radar at first.

I didn’t get this impression at all. I thought the dad was portrayed as very caring, trying to do his best but oblivious to the dangers around him and perhaps a bit distant in the critical adolescent years. I thought the dad’s influence was responsible for the chink of light at the end when the son started to take accountability by changing his plea to guilty. The son obviously really cared what his dad thought of him and had a different model of masculinity from his dad to that presented by his peers, and while like many adolescents he went along with his peers with fatal consequences, the session with the psychologist in the third episode obviously sowed seeds that perhaps he reflected on in the intervening months. I saw him changing his plea as possibly representing a shift in his values.

I thought the story in the final episode about the school dance when the parents were 13 and how everyone laughed at the dad and how he responded to this public humiliation, contrasted with how the son responded to the online public humiliation of being called an incel and not getting a date to the dance. I also thought it was interesting that the parents had fond memories of the teacher supervising the dance, while for the son and his peers, there is no adult supervision online, except of course from predatory individuals.

I wonder if this’ll change once generations get older. For example: I am a millennial when the internet just came out in my teens… I am aware of the risks and I’m quite internet savvy and use social media a lot. When/if have children, I’m really going to watch them and follow them when they get social media.

Maybe, I don't know. The main problem is parents who think that limiting their kids' access on the Internet is enough; it isn't, by a long shot. It's just the same as everything else in life, it's about the parents knowing the actual risks well enough to teach their children how to manage and mitigate them, as well as their kids being able to have open conversations about what's going on without blame.

That requires the parents to actively keep up with each new generation's use of technology; human nature doesn't change, and adults have always resisted the idea that their kids' experience of growing up is wildly different to their own. 100+ years ago that might've been the case...however, with the pace of technological development now, it never will be the case again.

I agree with you. The problem is complacency. I think many parents become complacent, but good parenting is a real skill and a quality all the same. I do believe a balance is to be had between good supervision and discipline and respect. I also think a good relationship is needed with your kids in order for them to listen to you.

BEAR WITH ME , I am only episode 1 in . Harrowing enough , I shall watch the rest. I am presenting only the side of the parent of a young man having gone through the criminal justice system.

I am the mother of an sen now just turned 18 year old .
Bright , asd , adhd , epileptic angry young man watched his mother abused ( me ) until age 3 when I found the strength to end the marriage and then again watched his stepmother resulting in his father imprisoned and total loss of contact with his half brother .

He has been arrested 13 times , spent periods in “ care “ ( was never helpful , some amazing people work in child and young peoples services …alongside many “ carers “ who abuse the system for financial gain and social workers who outright lie to alleviate paperwork … but the good ones have their backs up against the wall due to a lack of funding every time )

So far we have escaped custodial for him ..his crimes have been theft, damage to property and assault .Not sexual or end of life .. i make no excuses but know the 2 assault charges were against care workers he first was sexually abused by and the second he witnessed another child as victim .

He has no qualifications , no confidence to engage in apprenticeship ( and charities have offered .,many organisations do offer ) and no job . I have recently spent time locating my child sleeping rough and bought him home .. it isn’t happy clappy .. it’s hard as f actually .

This is a truly outstanding piece of television … so much of it resonated with me

I can tell you Stephen Grahams portrayal is terrifyingly accurate . The actor who played the duty solicitor had it exactly how I have repeatedly seen it .The palpable discomfort of the police .. “let’s get you cornflakes son “

FOR ME PERSONALLY THE MOST HEARTBREAKINGLY ACCURATE SO FAR

1.that grey jogging suit they give our kids to wear in custody , it swamps them . What the episode didn’t share is these outfits are purposefully designed to have no straps or belts to safeguard from suicide .
my child has been suicidal when grasping the magnitude

the scene when they strip search the boy , the duty solicitor and nurse turned their backs .,,Stephen Graham didn’t take his eyes off his child for a flicker . I have stood in his shoes , I didn’t shift my gaze from my child for a second either

I have many ideas as a result of my experiences .. I would ban social media outright before the age of 18 full stop as one example. The likes of Andrew Tate and Bonnie Blue have a lot to answer for .

AMA , I have grown pretty resilient .

I purposefully haven’t mentioned the victim in this television series as I hope others will understand , I am simply presenting my one side of the experience .
It is by no means a lack of recognition or respect

It’s a harrowing but compelling watch. I found the b&q stuff with the dad in the final episode almost as uncomfortable as some of the scenes with Jamie. There is something about make aggression that makes me shrink and even just watching it on the tv I felt smaller. Seeing the mum and the sister crying in the car splattered with paint you could feel they were just on egg shells.

Yes I suppose so. Before I came online, all I'd experienced in Britain was men joking around, like they were trying to wind me up with sexist comments, but it was said with a laugh. Then when I came into contact with USA culture online, I experienced men full of anger and hatred. It felt so different than European love and romance culture. It isn't only men against women over there though, as I heard many USA women tell men they're disgusting if not circumcised.

Before Andrew Tate, there was a USA man banned from entering Britain as he was going to promote his ideas about abusing women while travelling. He then wrote on his website that he thought it was just about free speech. I forget his name, but the website was called Kings something.

I’m so sorry for your experience, it sounds like you have been through hell. I totally agree they should just ban smart phones/social media for kids up to 18yrs. We shouldn’t even have to deal with this as parents. Parenting is hard enough especially for parents of vulnerable kids like yours. Our children wouldn’t be allowed into bars to chat to weird adult strangers but they are allowed online. They wouldn’t be able to go to sex shows but they can online. Parental controls don’t work, the instructions to turn them off from age 13yrs are on Tik Tok. I know kids this age watching porn on one phone at school and often this is violent imagery. I complained to Apple who said there is nothing they can do about it (of course they can with their tech ability) It’s infuriating we have to accept this in UK and think this is acceptable for our children. I know we can talk to them about what they see but it would be better if they didn’t have to see it in the first place

Thanks so much for sharing your experience. You have been through so much. I completely agree on the social media.

If you think it's possible to do what you're asking, you really don't understand the technology involved. It's not magic.

Any on-device content blocks - as you seem to believe Apple should do for you - are compromised right from the start, because if someone has physical access to a device they already have full control; that's basic security principles at work. There was an experiment done a few years ago, where a countermeasure for a fairly advanced content restriction application was found, and by lunchtime that very same day it had been implemented by around 70% of the children in a school.

On the other hand, you could demand that the networks implement it. Unfortunately, there are two problems with that - first is that the device doesn't need to access their network, and phones can just attach to any hotspot via wi-fi (eg another child's phone which runs through another network) to completely defeat the block. Second is that such blocks have to do deep packet inspection on encrypted data without the keys (everything runs through HTTPS these days). That means a) compromising everybody's security, safety privacy online, and b) everybody's Internet connections will simultaneously double in price and get slower, because hardware capable of doing that at scale is incredibly expensive.

The battle is lost from the off; if you believe otherwise, then you really are kidding yourself. And, of course, none of that would even begin to protect children from the events of Adolescence.

The only thing that will do that is teaching children to be responsible online.

Wow
this is really interesting @ntmdino
thankyou

so given all this information ( which I genuinely consider helpful and informative )
and given the fact it’s a default in teenagers often ( not always ) not to listen to their parents advice ( I didn’t myself )

I would argue we need stronger legislation over social media for our children
these are not small tragedies occurring and they are far from isolated

And yet this is still expecting other people to solve parents' problems for them.

No amount of legislation is going to help; by the time any breaches of the law bear fruit, the damage is already done. By the time laws are updated, kids will have already found a way around them. All it achieves is collateral damage.

That's the understanding you need: the damage done on social media is at least partly done by your children's peers, and possibly your children themselves. Most people wouldn't even have the first clue if their kids were the aggressors online, and wouldn't recognise it even if it were right in front of them. Everybody likes to imagine that bullying online is some overweight 11yr old lad with no friends yelling obscenities at people while they're playing Call of Duty; that might've been true 20 years ago, but children are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than that now and they've left their parents in the dust.

Even if the parents were finally persuaded that was the case, they'd blame the tech companies, they'd blame the ISPs, they'd blame the government...always somebody else who should've stopped it.

How do I know this? Well, I spend most of my life online, for good or ill. I'm that autistic kid who was ostracised, and the only place I could find acceptance was on the Internet; I've been immersed in Internet culture since the early 90s. I've watched the evolution of online bullying in tandem with online culture (yes, it's a culture and it has immense positives too), and I've long despaired at the denial and dismissal of it all by folk who primarily live in the real world.

This is the story of parental failure, and the fact that so many parents seek to deny it makes it pretty clear how it happened. It's too late to start when kids are teenagers. It needs to be baked in from the beginning, just like how to cross the road safely.

The fundamental truth is that 99% of parents simply don't understand the world their kids live in, and they don't want to understand it - because that would mean admitting that the world moved on without them 20 years ago.

The murderers of Olly Stephens were from loving functional families I believe, and the same age as Jamie and heavily influenced by social media.

@suahI just looked this case up and it sounds as though one of his killers was well known to children's services and his schools had repeatedly flagged up concerns about his violent tendencies, and the danger he posed to others.
I think it is highly doubtful that a child would kill like this without any kind of prior history of violence/ some sort of huge trauma