'I'm mum to a 13-year-old - here's why Adolescence is a bone-chilling watch' (2025)

With Adolescence released on the day her son turned 13, our TV columnist Sara Wallis explains why the intense drama filled her with dread

On the very day that my son turned 13, as the ‘teenager in the house’ sympathy messages piled up and I wondered how my baby was suddenly taller than me, a new drama was released that terrified me to my very core.

Netflix’s latest ratings hit Adolescence tells the devastating story of how a family’s world is turned upside down when their 13-year-old son is arrested for the murder of a girl at his school. Of course it’s highly unlikely that your sweet little boy is going to head out one day and kill someone, but this very clever crime thriller shows just how possible that might be.

By the end of the series, I had all but decided that the best course of action was probably to tell my son Josh that we’re all moving to a cave in some far-reaching place with no WiFi.

Created by actor Stephen Graham, along with top screenwriter Jack Thorne, the powerful drama explores frightening themes of social media, toxic masculinity and misogyny. Through intense, one-take, real-time episodes, we find out that while parents might think their child is safe in their bedroom, out of harm’s way - in fact they could be being sucked into hate and danger that can escalate out of control.

So as the huge foil ‘13’ balloons bobbed up and down innocently in the corner of my living room, I binge-watched the four gripping hours of television, sending me into a cold sweat and vowing to ban all devices forever. Of course, any parent of a teen will know that trying to control and manage the relentless onslaught of apps and devices, that continue to morph and twist out of reach, is like trying to boil the ocean - futile, desperate, pointless.

Stephen, who plays the boy’s dad, says: “We could have made a drama about gangs and knife crime, or about a kid whose mother is an alcoholic, or whose father is a violent abuser. “Instead, we wanted you to look at this family and think, ‘My God. This could be happening to us!’ And what’s happening here is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare.”

Yep, thanks Stephen, it worked. I won’t sleep again, but don’t worry, I probably wouldn’t have done anyway. As the parent of a boy and an 11-year-old girl (aka tween), my list of worries is already long enough to fill several tomes.

Things I am already anxious about: health, injury, teeth, friendships, school work, down time, phones, social media, no social media, grooming, trolling, Snapchat, gaming, screen time, sleep, nutrition, catching the bus or train alone, not enough independence, too much independence, bullying, peer pressure, natural disasters… I could go on and I’m always open to new ones. Then as they get older, the joy is that you can worry less about play dates and healthy snacks and the annoying woman on the PTA, and more about drugs, alcohol, body image, mental health and ‘Where the hell are they?’ and ‘Oh my god, should they really be driving?’ I’m having a breakdown just thinking about it. It’s fair to say, we all already fear for the future of our children, and this unsettling drama takes that fear and runs with it - all the way to the most devastating of consequences.

In Adolescence, teen Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) is asleep in bed when the police batter down the door on a dawn raid, drag him from his bed and arrest him for murder. He’s sobbing and biting his nails, he has wet himself, while his dad Eddie (Graham), mum Manda (Christine Tremarco) and sister Lisa (Amelie Pease) are all scared, yelling, crying and confused. As Jamie is hauled down to the police station by cop DI Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and held in a cell, protesting his innocence, your heart goes out to this baby-faced boy, until details slowly unravel about his views, his interactions online, his lack of self-esteem.

“Don’t worry, it’s just a mistake, you see it on the telly all the time,” says Manda, as the action plays out with one long intense take, making for uncomfortable viewing. What emerges is that this is not a whodunit, it’s a whydunit. It’s not about whether Jamie committed the murder, but a focus on what is happening to young men these days, leaving us parents with our own baby-faced kids and some confronting truths. It’s a deep dive into big issues, including online bullying, social media, the climate of toxic masculinity (self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate gets a mention), sexism fuelled by online communities of InCels (involuntary celibates), and the disconnect between children and parents who no longer understand their kids’ world.

An alarming recent study showed that 69% of boys aged 11-14 had been exposed to online content that promotes misogyny and other harmful views, with 42% of parents saying they’d heard their son make inappropriate comments that were sexual, violent or degrading to women and girls. It’s enough to make my blood run cold. In heartrending scenes, Eddie and Manda grapple with grief and anger and ask themselves some brutal questions - did we do enough? Stephen says: “They ask how much they are responsible for ‘making’ Jamie. Did they have any idea what he was doing when he was on that computer alone in his bedroom? No. But then, does any parent really know?” As we hurtle towards inevitable tragedy, every parent needs to watch this.

Adolescence is available now on Netflix

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