Adolescence landed on Netflix in March 2025 and, almost instantly, became a phenomenon. A taut, beautifully crafted British crime drama centered on a 13-year-old accused of murder, it is both compulsive and logistically daring in its use of single-take episodes. Viewers responded in droves. It has become the first programme on a streaming platform to get to number one in the weekly audience charts in the UK. According to the Radio Times, “Worldwide, the show was viewed 24.3 million times in its first week of release, with almost 100 million hours watched in total.”
Critics have greeted it as something special. The Guardian called it, “as close to televisual perfection as you can get.” A critic at their polar opposite, The Daily Mail, raved that she could not “recall the last time I was as blown away as I was by the one-take drama Adolescence.” But the reviews have not simply gone wild about quality and style. Slant suggested that, “it clears space to ask the more pressing, complicated, and unsettling question of why.” Salon pinned it as “a gripping call to action that has genuine potential to change minds and save lives.” Within weeks, it is being talked about not just as television, but as a mirror — reflecting something raw, real, and rotten in contemporary Britain, and beyond.
The show’s success has quickly propelled it beyond the realm of TV criticism. Politicians have started seizing on its power. No less a grandee than our current Prime Minister has proclaimed the show as “a torch that shines intensely brightly on a combination of issues that many people don’t know how to respond to.” His comments have helped fold the show into a broader conversation about social policy. There’s a growing sense that Adolescence, for all its drama, is being received as something more like a dispatch from the front lines. Sir Keir Starmer has not only welcomed Netflix’s decision to make the show freely available to schools; he has repeatedly referred to it as “a documentary.” The slippage is telling—and it’s at the heart of how the show’s crafted narrative is being mistaken for fact.
The creators haven’t exactly discouraged this state of affairs. Jack Thorne, who co-penned the series, has spoken in interviews about the show, “…making a point about masculinity (…) about boys.” All of which may be true—but the framing, intentional or not, risks positioning the work as diagnosis rather than drama. And that’s where things begin to blur.
The real question isn’t whether the issues Adolescence gestures toward are relevant. They undoubtedly speak to anxieties in the culture. The question is whether viewers, politicians, perhaps even the writer himself have forgotten that the show’s power doesn’t lie in its truthfulness, but in its craft. It feels real because it’s made to feel real. What we’re dealing with here isn’t just content or commentary. It’s a style. A narrative mode. One we’ve come to mistake for reality itself. To understand this, we need to go to the great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye and his definition of the low mimetic.
To understand why Adolescence has been received by many viewers — and by politicians — as a kind of documentary, we need to reframe the question. What we’re dealing with is not just a question of content or message, but of mode. That is, how a story is told — and how that mode shapes our sense of what’s real.
For this, the most useful framework remains Northrop Frye’s “Theory of Modes,” set out in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Frye proposes that all narrative fiction can be understood in terms of how its central characters relate to both the audience and their world. This gives us five primary modes: mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic.
The low mimetic mode is where most “realist” fiction lives
At one end of the scale, we have characters who are superior to us in kind — gods, or divine heroes — occupying the mythic mode. At the other end, we find characters inferior to us in power or understanding, who are trapped, absurd, or diminished. This is the ironic mode. In between lie three further stages: the romantic (where the hero is greater than other men and acts on a heightened plane); the high mimetic(tragedy and epic, where the hero is noble but bound by natural law); and, centrally, the low mimetic.
The low mimetic mode is where most “realist” fiction lives. Its heroes are “one of us” — neither godlike nor absurd, but ordinary people navigating recognisable lives. Their experiences are plausible, their worlds familiar, their struggles close to our own. This is the mode of the domestic novel, the social drama, the kitchen sink. Importantly, Frye notes that in low mimetic fiction, plausibility — rather than truth — is the driving aesthetic force. This isn’t reality. It’s something that feels real.
Now, it doesn’t take a genius of insight to recognise that much British drama sits squarely within the low mimetic mode. Ever since the kitchen sink movement burst onto the scene in the 1950s, bringing films, plays and novels dealing with “ordinary” working people within recognisably realistic situations, Britain has been down with the low mimetic. The groundbreaking soap opera Coronation Street and the seminal sitcoms Steptoe and Son and The Likely Lads brought the mode to millions. Viewers were genuinely surprised and delighted to see characters enacting situations, doing jobs, and living in homes and families they recognised as their own. Television dramas such as Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home were not merely masterpieces of the low mimetic; they were agents of social change. Cathy Come Home was especially impactful. It not only dealt in a shockingly realistic fashion with the subject of homelessness; the homelessness charity Crisis was formed as a reaction to the broadcast and its attendant brouhaha.
From that moment on, the low mimetic was firmly cemented as the prevailing mode of drama within the UK. Crime drama became noticeably grittier and more realistic, from Z Cars to The Sweeney. Kids were shown a mirror of their own school days in Grange Hill. Hospital visits could be recognised via episodes of Casualty. The low mimetic has become, for many people, the only mode that matters.
The low mimetic has become an almost sainted mode of drama, celebrated for tackling “real life issues” and even credited with helping solve them. How many times have you tuned into an episode of the BBC’s flagship low mimetic soap opera Eastenders and witnessed the credits followed by a message asking, “Have you been affected by the issues in this programme?” followed by a phone number to call. Real people being offered real advice because of a fictional plotline in the low mimetic mode.
It’s almost as if you were watching a documentary of your life…
Adolescence has become a political football. Starmer, backed by the writer Thorne, has positioned it as a guide to policy and a watchtower for youth. Adolescence is seen as providing answers to the question of youth violence and a rising tide of adolescent male misogyny. It is not only a dramatization of the symptoms — a murder by a child and the bemusement of the adult world in its fallout — but also of the causes. Some of the characters mutter and fret about Andrew Tate and the enigma of what boys are discovering on social media. This has been interpreted by some as a diagnosis that Tate, social media access and even smart phones are to blame for a rising tide of youth acting and thinking in the ways in which the young antagonist does.
I am not convinced that rooting around for solutions does the series any justice
This in turn has created its own reaction. For everyone who says or writes that Adolescence gives a righteous diagnosis, there are as many who say that the series is barking up the wrong tree. The boy, they complain, is the wrong ethnicity. Or he has two parents. Or it is unlikely that something as simple as social media and a little exposure to Tate would push an otherwise well-behaved and high-achieving boy into a bloody murder. For these people, the political elevation of the series is a sign that Starmer and his policy wonks are unable or unwilling to understand what is really wrong in society — fatherlessness, or unintegrated migrants, or whatever — and so are clutching at the straw of the series’ implausible diagnosis. As Frye reminds us, plausibility — not accuracy — is the hallmark of the low mimetic. “Imitation of nature in fiction produces, not truth or reality, but plausibility” — a plausibility that becomes a kind of censor principle in what we think is “realistic.” Let us remember that it is not implausible that a child may kill without falling under the malign spell of any influencer. Mary Bell and the murderers of Jamie Bulger struck long before the internet. There may have been instigating factors in their home lives. But such factors would appear in the home lives of many who never kill. We are left with a plausible enigma.
In any case, I am not convinced that rooting around for solutions does the series any justice. Adolescence doesn’t provide a plausible explanation for the baffling crime. Although we, like the characters, scrabble to understand what has happened, the piece ultimately sits with the dignity of showing that it is inexplicable. The boy we meet under psychological assessment in Episode 3 is angry, defensive, sly, playful, terrified of being thought ugly, and overwhelmingly dislikable and alarming. Like Bunyan’s Mr Badman, he has a loving pair of parents. There seem to be few genuine clues as to what could make him a berserk killer who savagely stabs a girl to death. We may as well join the 17th century Baptist in blaming the lad’s foul character on the devil. In fact, if we nod along with those characters who blame the Luton influencer, we’ve done it. We’ve blamed a folk devil. We’ve blamed Old Nick.
All of this seems about as worthwhile as those secondary school essays some of us were made to write about the motivations of Othello’s nemesis, Iago. It may be that Iago is a racist, or a disciple of Machiavelli, or a closet homosexual, or impotent, or thinks he’s been cuckolded, or is simply angry that he was passed over for promotion. Shakespeare doesn’t pretend to know, he simply presents the malignancy. We’re left with what St Paul calls “the mystery of iniquity.”
Adolescence is a masterpiece of the low mimetic. In saying that, we assert that Adolescence is a work of artifice which is produced within a specific mode, and that it inhabits that mode so successfully as to be a model of its type. Like any work of fiction, we go to it for many things. To be intrigued, excited, awed, entertained — and moved. Some of the most moving moments of Adolescence happen when the camera lingers for a short while on one or other of the actor’s faces as the import of what the character is witnessing registers on that face.
One such moment comes in Episode 2, as we watch the DI’s face register the sheer dreadfulness of the school environment. We cannot know what is going on within the character at that moment, but the actor (Ashley Walters) conveys a human being caught in a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings, faced not only by this complex case he is investigating but also his relationship with his own teenage son. Now, that moment results in him inviting his son to spend what people call “quality time” with him towards the close of the episode. This feels entirely plausible and emotionally satisfying for the audience. Performance, aesthetics, and narrative combine to produce a moment of pure gold.
One way to tarnish such moments is to treat the site wherein they sit — the TV series Adolescence — as something other than a piece of artistic alchemy which results in the transmutation of ordinary lives and experience into the gold of empathy. It might prompt a viewer to make a mental note: spend more time with the kids. Or to give some thought to how difficult it is to be a father in the contemporary world, which the world of the film mirrors closely. But the series is neither a report nor an advertisement. It isn’t prepped with an executive summary for policymakers. Nor does it result in a Call to Action to buy an off-the-shelf solution or panacea which has been product placed.
The moment of portraiture with the DI moved me deeply. I came away admiring Walters’ abilities as an actor. I admire the abilities of the writer, director and other creatives to create such great moments and string them into a cohesive whole. I did contemplate on how such moments reflect and may thereafter inform how I interact with the young people I know. But I do not know that the DI talking to his son will result in anything positive, entirely because the series does not go there. Nor should it. To reduce such a moment to the banality of saying “it’s good to talk” would be facile. As any student of drama knows, good intentions may result in any number of poor results.
Drama is about the results, often unintended, of good and bad intentions. It allows us to feel alongside those in fictional moments and their aftermath. A drama series is ultimately a narrative compendium of such moments. I feel queasy about one being used as prima facie evidence to ban phones, or limit social media, or diagnose an entire generation of young people.
Returning Adolescence to the categories of artifice and fiction does not do it a disservice
Because low mimetic television programmes have a history of social impact beyond the confines of the dramas they convey — from the aforementioned Cathy Come Home to the more recent Mr Bates Vs. The Post Office — there is a temptation for us to believe that this is what such dramas exist for. Not only viewers but the creators themselves are subject to this lure. But Adolescence is no less an intricate artifice than Game of Thrones (an example of Frye’s high mimetic, with elements of the mythic) or Severance (which sits squarely in the ironic mode). All three are fictions, each in its own mode, and none is “truer” — despite Adolescence’s realist disguise.
Returning Adolescence to the categories of artifice and fiction does not do it a disservice. It frees it from the attempt to box it as mere journalism. When we watch Cathy Come Home today, the removal of the protagonist’s child remains enormously moving, even though the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977 helped alleviate the worst symptoms of the real-life issues that inspired its fiction. History offers a cautionary tale here. Jack Thorne would do well to look at the subsequent career of Ken Loach, who has often allowed his requirement to push a social agenda to stretch the very thing that Frye suggests we judge a low mimetic work by — plausibility.
The salient question around Adolescence is whether it is plausible that an intelligent young man with two loving parents kills a female classmate in an act of savage violence. I believe it is — given the potential depths and darkness of each individual human heart. I do think it’s implausible that Andrew Tate and social media made him do it, but I don’t believe that the series itself claims this. The series allowed me to witness the attitudes of that baleful and pitiable young murderer and the heartbreak and confusion of those devastated in the wake of his crime. I am left with the dignity of being allowed to think, there but for the grace of God go my loved ones and I.
