Netflix's Adolescence misses the mark on the impact of incel culture

spoilers ahead

Given the current state of the world, Netflix’s Adolescence came at a time when we desperately need to confront the type of violence that runs so deep within our society that even our children aren’t safe — violence against women, in all its forms, but mainly the kind that results in the murder of little girls.

This show covers an incident, yes, but it can more aptly be characterized as a show that covers a topic. Ot at least, it attempted to. And while I agree the 4-episode limited series was extremely well-crafted, it left me on a note of disappointment.

Credit where credit is due, the actors did an excellent job and Owen Cooper, who played the protagonist, gave us a stunning portrayal of a young, angry, incredibly misguided boy. The cinematography was beautiful. Each episode was filmed in one, uninterrupted shot, which is an impressive feat for a 40-minute run time. And lastly, it started a conversation, one that we’ve had many times for sure but never about this —male on female violence in children.

The show opens with 13-year old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) being torn away from his bed by the armed police on suspicion of the murder of his classmate, Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday). Once at the police station, Jamie is interrogated by Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Detective Sergeant Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) where he, Jamie, pleads his innocence with his father, Eddie Miller (Stephen Graham), by his side.

But we all know Jamie isn’t innocent. That much is not left up to interpretation. Short of being a murder mystery, Jamie’s crime is unveiled in the very first episode. A CCTV camera footage of Jamie stabbing Katie with a kitchen knife multiple times in a parking lot comes to light. The detectives leave the room and Jamie’s father embraces him as they both break into tears, his father wondering what the hell his son had become.

The episode that follows revolves around Detective Bascombe and Frank searching for a motive and the murder weapon, visiting Jamie’s school and interrogating his classmates and friends, hoping for some kind of answer. The atmosphere at the school is heavy but not grave. Boys are still making jokes, spewing insults at their teachers, getting violent with each other on school grounds. The third episode takes place in one room where Jamie gets interrogated by child psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty). This episode takes a deep dive into Jamie’s brain, trying to figure out what would compel a boy of his age, of his stature, to attack a girl. The episode reveals Jamie’s tendency to throw fits of rage, even in the presence of an adult.

The final episode follows Jamie’s family in the aftermath of their son’s arrest, grappling with the reaction they receive from the community after the news. It focuses on Jamie’s father, and his habit of behaving violently when stressed out, a habit he no doubt passed on to his son. At the end of the episode, Eddie receives a call from his son who tells his father that he’s going to plead guilty.

And then it’s over.

Adolescence starts off strong but ends on an underwhelming note. No more mention of Katie Leonard, the victim, and her family. No discussion on Jamie’s trial and whether he gets convicted. And no overall justice for all the little girls in real life who ended up like Katie by the hands of violent boys like Jamie. Just like that, a show that could’ve been great… just wasn’t.

What seemingly started out as a discussion on misogyny in young boys turned into your average crime drama, where the killer’s mind is site of fascination, the lives he took just another part of his story. That is why Adolescence missed the mark.

The biggest problem of Adolescence is the severe lack of focus on Katie Leonard, her character reduced to just another victim. We get to see her maybe once through a photograph and once in the CCTV camera footage. We don’t know anything about her as a person — other than the comments she left on Jamie’s Instagram (which I’ll discuss later). Her family doesn’t appear in the show at all, not physically or through any other means. We’re shown Katie’s memorial through an overhead shot but the scene is more about Eddie and his guilt for his son’s crime than it is about Katie. We only see Katie through the grieving Jade (Fatima Bojang), Katie’s best friend, who calls Katie “the best person [she] knew” (“Episode 2”). But the detectives are more interested in Katie’s relationship with the boys around, trying to understand the motive behind Jamie’s actions, as if she only serves to understand his story better.

But that isn’t all we have to unpack. Another problem I faced when watching this series is Jamie’s supposed motive. One of the few things we learn about Katie is in the third episode, where the child psychologist, Briony has a long conversation with Jamie. Here, we learn that a topless photo of Katie has been spread around a group of boys, who made fun of her for the size of her breasts. Thinking she’d be vulnerable, Jamie decides to ask her out only to be rejected and subjected to ridicule by Katie herself, who leaves comments on Jamie’s Instagram profile accusing Jamie of being an incel (involuntarily celibate). The show categorizes Katie’s comments as “bullying,” which is far from accurate. Are they nice things to say? Surely, no. But being called an “incel” carries much different connotations than being called, say, stupid, loser, or ugly.

The term incel specifically comes from a “loose conglomerate of online anti-woman communities known as the ‘manosphere’”.¹ These communities have grown to exhibit increasingly hostile views towards women and these views often culminate in violent acts against women, much like the murder of Adolescence’s Katie Leonard. I understand this show is about the impact of toxic masculinity and incel culture on young boys but it fails to justly acknowledge its counterpart — incel culture’s impact on young girls, who are suffering the brunt of this violent ideology.

But let’s be honest here. Jamie didn’t kill Katie because she called him an incel. Jamie killed her because he was a boy with unchecked anger, corrupted by the online manosphere community and enraged that Katie wouldn’t go out with him. Because in our world, when a man kills a woman, it’s normally not out of self-defence, not out of being bullied, not out of fear for their lives. It is almost always out of male entitlement to women. Jamie was so deep into the belief that he was entitled to Katie that her simple act of choosing not to go out with him (after being targeted by his friends, mind you) made him want to kill her. You see, women don’t have to “bully” men to meet Katie’s fate and to twist Katie’s story into a sort of cyber-bullying-victim-kills-his-bully incident, we fail to acknowledge the rampant misogyny that turns young boys into violent murderers.

I lastly want to critique the writers of the show. A Rolling Stone interview with Adolescence’s cowriter Stephen Graham (yes, Eddie Miller) reveals that this show was inspired by the real life murders of women that he was seeing all around him, perpetuated by “boys, [not men].”² But nowhere during the interview does he mention Katie’s side of it all. Excuse me, a young girl was stabbed multiple times by her classmate and yet the show gives her death no closure and no justice. Understanding Jamie’s motive is important, no doubt, but why does that have to come at the cost of the victim’s agency and autonomy. Why is Katie not a person but a victim? I see the conversation Adolescence sets out to start, but what I don’t see is the show taking a firm stance on the topic it explores. What I needed, as a viewer and as a woman, was to see the show saying this is completely unacceptable. That a 13-year old boy can be a murderer and not just a victim of toxic masculinity.

Yet, the show said none of that. A last episode focused on Jamie’s conviction might have given closure to Katie’s story. To show her killer, 13 years old as he was, going to jail for his crime would have been taking a stance against this toxic, violent, and utterly unacceptable ideology. Even to keep true to the one-shot style of each episode, the camera could have spanned to the front steps of the court and shown some sort of protest against Jamie’s innocence outside, perhaps a shot of Katie’s family speaking to the press and Jamie’s family grappling with the verdict. That might’ve demonstrated that the issue is bigger than Jamie and Katie, bigger than the family, big enough that putting Jamie in jail won’t ensure that it’ll never happen again, but it would at least ensure that when it happens, the perpetrators will be brought to justice and not just opened up to be examined with an air of fascination.

1. What are incels? And should we consider their ideology an extremist one related to the far-right?

2. Fear, David. “‘We’ve Got to Start Talking About This’: Stephen Graham on Making ‘Adolescence.” Rolling Stone, March 22, 2025, https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/adolescence-stephen-graham-interview-1235299218/.