**Adolescence spoilers incoming **
Welcome to ‘Showtime with Emily Maddick’, in which GLAMOUR’S Assistant Editor and Entertainment Director brings a unique perspective to the month’s most hyped film or TV show. For March’s instalment, Emily reviews Adolescence the new four part crime-drama from Netflix. This powerful and terrifying show, from Peaky Blinders’ Stephen Graham, focuses on the story of a 13-year-old boy who is arrested and accused of stabbing a school girl to death. Despite being fiction, the show raises important real life themes of toxic masculinity and its impact on the current epidemic of violence against women and girls. And Emily points out that it is image-based abuse that is at the heart of this tragic story, which serves to highlight the importance of GLAMOUR’s campaigning of the government to make a comprehensive image-based abuse law a reality.
There’s a moment in the final episode of Adolescence when Stephen Graham’s character Eddie and his wife Manda (Christine Tremarco) are reminiscing about a school disco in the 80s, when they first got together as teenagers. It comes much to the squirming embarrassment of their 17-year-old daughter, Lisa (Amelie Pease), who is with them, riding in the front of her Dad’s van. Eddie forces Lisa to listen to Aha’s Take on Me, while he regales how he, playing the fool, wore a pink wig to try and impress her mum before falling flat on his face on the dance floor. He then recalls walking his future wife home, holding her hand all the way, before she ‘snogged his face off’ outside her parents’ house.
Ben Blackall/Netflix
This nostalgic tale of teenage romance is in stark, deliberate and heartbreakingly poignant contrast to a scene from the previous episode. We see Eddie and Manda’s 13-year-old son, Jamie – who is in police custody awaiting trial accused of the murder his classmate Katie – being questioned by his psychiatrist (Erin Doherty). Jamie (in an astonishing debut performance from 14-year-old Owen Cooper) reveals that just weeks before Katie’s death, he had plucked up the courage to ask her to go on a date to the local funfair. Another familiar moment of seemingly innocent teenage romance, but one that was to have a horrifying consequence. For we learn that it was Katie’s subsequent rejection and mockery of Jamie that ultimately led to her being stabbed seven times to death in a car park – the crime Jamie now stands accused of.
Much has been written about how Adolescence, the brainchild of Peaky Blinders and This is England star Stephen Graham and Joy writer Jack Thorne, is every parent’s worst nightmare. But given the real life topics that are so deftly covered – the radicalisation of young boys in the manosphere and incel culture, bullying, social media-fuelled misogyny and the current epidemic of violence against women and girls – it is a wake up call for everyone, parent or not.
Adolescence really is one of the most uncomfortable and frightening pieces of television I’ve seen in years. It will haunt you for a long time afterwards, such is its power to bring to light the real world modern dangers young girls and boys are facing today.