Dark truth unveiled by the show that tackles male rage

Psychotherapist Camilla Nicholls often deals with the fallout from toxic culture portrayed in Netflix series Adolescence’, as she goes beyond the consulting room to offer adults help

- Camilla Nicholls

It is a credit to the co-writers, Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, and the director, Philip Barantini, that nothing about the Netflix four-part miniseries Adolescence seems remotely accidental. It starts with its title, a solitary umbrella term that encompasses one of the most powerful transitional periods of our lives. It’s when the desire to differentiate and individuate, especially from our parents, is in conflict with the equally strong wish to be understood by them and the world at large.

The series stars the remarkable Owen Cooper as 13-year-old Jamie Miller who is arrested and accused of murdering Katie, another teenager at his school. He vigorously denies it to the police, his family, his solicitor and the independent psychiatrist tasked with assessing him. Almost immediately we see (with a few exceptions) every under-resourced professional trying their best to be careful in their handling of the teenager in an extreme situation.

The writing is exceptional. Jamie’s first name is liberally scattered throughout every address to him and the overt politeness and covert tension of the adults feels familiar to anyone who has encountered policing or social services.

The heartbreak of Jamie’s family, in particular his father Eddie, played by Stephen Graham at peak power, never leaves our thoughts throughout the four parts. The victim, Katie, is kept in mind while the focus remains on why Jamie not only carried out the brutal act but can continue to believe he’s “done nothing wrong”.

As psychoanalyst Dr Margot Waddell states in her essential book On Adolescence: Inside Stories (2018), any stage of transition “spells or suggests instability, loss, change, uncertainty, the unknown; the shift from something familiar, and therefore relatively safe, to something foreign and potentially threatening”. And this is probably never more true than during the transition into adolescence.