[COLUMN] The Missing Piece of Adolescence | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains a full discussion of Adolescence, the four-part streaming miniseries on Netflix. It’s great and well worth your time, if you haven’t seen it already. It’s one of the best shows of the year, even if this piece is somewhat critical of it. 

Adolescence is a phenomenal piece of work. It is an ambitious and thoughtful interrogation of young male violence, written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham and directed by Philip Barantini.

The four-part Netflix drama has drawn deserved praise for both its subject matter and its form. The show’s four episodes are essentially four long takes, a dazzling technical accomplishment that showcases the skill of the cast and crew. The show also deals with incredibly urgent subject matter, exploring the aftermath of the killing of schoolgirl Katie (Emilia Holliday) by her classmate Jamie (Owen Cooper), delving into how Jamie was radicalized to murder by online misogyny.

It is hard to overstate the impact of Adolescence. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, has met with the show’s creators to address the issues that it raises. Starmer has also advocated for the series to be shown in schools in the hope of opening up a debate on young male violence. Netflix has made the show available to screen for free in schools across the United Kingdom. On top of simply being a really good, well-made drama, Adolescence is a genuinely important piece of culture.

The miniseries has a very clever and very interesting structure. Although each of the individual episodes are made to look like a single extended take and unfold in real time, they are also spaced apart. The entire series is not real time. Individual episodes can be separated from one another by days, weeks or months. This allows the show to provide a more holistic view of events than a simple four hour real-time window into the investigation.

The first episode focuses on Jamie’s arrest and processing at the police station. The second episode follows Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Detective Inspector Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) as they look for the murder weapon at Jamie’s school. The third is an interview between Jamie and psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) as she tries to pull back the layers on Jamie. The fourth and final episode follows Jamie’s father, Eddie (Stephen Graham), on his birthday.

It's a smart way of providing an overview of the case and its various components. Jamie doesn’t even appear in the second episode and appears as a voice on the phone in the fourth. The show expands its focus beyond Jamie to explore what this act of violence means for the people around him. Bascombe tries to understand his own son, Adam (Amari Bacchus). Eddie puts on a brave face for his wife Manda (Christine Tremarco) and his daughter Lisa (Amélie Pease), grappling with his own guilt.

Part of the beauty of Adolescence is that this allows for a range of differing perspectives. The series opens with a heavy focus on Bascombe and Frank, but the pair do not appear in either the third or fourth episode. Ariston is one of the most interesting and compelling characters in the series, and the character who has the most profound interactions with Jamie, but she only appears in a single episode. Characters drift into and out of focus, capturing a sense of the chaos of an event like this.

However, there is an absent center to this story: Katie. The show begins after Katie’s death. She appears briefly in a video shown at the end of the first episode, CCTV footage depicting Jamie’s attack on her. She also appears in photographs at various points. Her social media posts are discussed. Her friend Jade (Fatima Bojang) talks about her. Jamie opens up about Katie to Ariston. Katie is less a character in the narrative than a constructed object filtered through perspectives.

This is not to suggest the series is unaware of Katie. In the show’s first three episodes, Bascombe and Ariston pry into the complicated relationship between Jamie and Katie, which includes topless pictures and online bullying, manosphere nonsense and predator dating practices. At one point, after Katie was embarrassed by the leaking of her nudes, Jamie asked her out because he thought she might be “weak” enough to say yes.

Indeed, the show repeatedly draws attention to Katie’s death and the sense in which the narrative around the case tends to focus on Jamie. During her interview with Jamie, even Ariston has to emphasize that Katie is now completely absent. “You understand that Katie's gone and she can't come back?” Ariston asks Jamie. “Whatever claims you make, she's gone. That whoever did kill her, they extinguished the possibility of her future life.”

At the school, Frank takes a moment to acknowledge the injustice in making Katie’s story all about Jamie. “Do you know what I don't like about this?” Frank asks her partner. “The perpetrator always gets the front line. ‘A man raped a woman.’ We've followed Jamie's brain around this entire case, right? Katie isn't important. Jamie is. Everyone will remember Jamie. No one will remember her. That's what annoys me. That's what gets to me.”

Adolescence is at least self-aware in this. One of the big reckonings around crime fiction in recent years has been the debate about the framing of these stories around male perpetrators at the expense of their (often female) victims. Over the past decade, the true crime genre has tried to reconfigure itself in such a way as to avoid glorifying or mythologizing male killers. It is a real challenge, as it’s hard to tell these stories without centering the male criminal.

After all, Adolescence is explicit about Jamie in a way that it is not about Katie. Thorne has acknowledged that the series derived from a desire to “look in the eye of male rage.” Graham was motivated by the question, “What's really going on here now, when young boys are stabbing young girls to death?” Adolescence is exploring a very real problem in contemporary culture, and that problem is Jamie, not Katie. As such, it makes sense for the show to focus on Jamie.

Thorne has acknowledged Katie’s relative absence from the show. “I don't think we're the right people to tell Katie's story,” the writer conceded. “I think there are other makers out there that could tell beautiful dramas about Katie or girls like Katie, and that those shows should be made. Our aim was to try and tell Jamie's story as fully as we possibly could, and maybe trying to tell her story would dilute that in some way, and maybe we would be inadequate for that task.”

Katie haunts Adolescence in a very literal way. The closing moments of the second episode, featuring a virtuoso transition from a handheld camera shot to a drone, are set to a cover of Sting’s “Fragile”, sung by Katie’s actor, Emilia Holliday. The show’s fourth episode closed with a cover of Aurora’s “Through the Eyes of a Child” that also incorporates vocals from Holliday. As with so much of Adolescence, the creative team have been very thoughtful about how they include Katie.

At the same time, the omission of any perspective aligning with Katie, even as characters draw attention to the absence of such a perspective, feels like the single biggest issue with Adolescence. The show has the structural freedom to explore these horrific events from a variety of perspectives. Even within the show’s long takes, the camera is careful to never tether itself to a single character, instead shifting from one to another to capture the overwhelming disorientation of such a crime.

The show’s fourth episode, focusing on Jamie’s family living with the consequences of Jamie’s actions and the guilt that they feel for their inability to recognize what was happening to him, is an incredibly affecting episode of television. It extends an incredible amount of empathy to Eddie and Manda, two parents who were – like so many parents – completely unprepared for the insidious influence of outside forces on their son’s worldview. It’s breathtaking and creatively risky. It asks the audience to side with a murderer’s parents.

Part of the beauty of Adolescence is that it understands the complicated emotional dynamics of a situation like this, that things are not black-and-white, that no single emotion holds a monopoly on the response to such a situation. It is possible to react with horror to the man that Jamie has become while also feeling some measure of pity for the long lost little boy he was. It’s possible to understand the guilt and shame that Eddie feels, while also feeling empathy and compassion for him.

It feels like Adolescence is missing a fifth episode, a companion piece to the episode focusing on Eddie and Manda, one that would explore what the loss of Katie felt like to her family. It could unpack the rumors and gossip around Katie, interrogating the way that Jamie frames her “bullying” of him, existing as it does in the context of her leaked nudes and eventual murder. How would it feel for Katie’s relatives to see her life narrativized entirely in the context of the boy who murdered her?

To be clear, none of this is to take away from the rest of the show. It is not a “gotcha.” Grief is not a competitive sport. It is possible to maintain empathy and sympathy for Eddie and Manda while also acknowledging the other family profoundly affected by these horrific events. This might feel like an unfair criticism of the show, but it is really a testament to how well Adolescence is constructed. The show is so good at understanding these ideas that this omission feels glaring.

So much of Adolescence is about the search for a missing piece, something that will make it all make sense. It is perhaps appropriate that, at least narratively, Katie is the show’s absent core.