Adolescence, Charlie Kirk, and the Rush for Easy Answers in the Wake of Brutality

The British series about a socially isolated teenage killer has much to say about what’s going on in America right now

“We know what he did. We’re not gonna know why.”

In Episode 2 of Adolescence, the harrowing limited series that dominated the Emmys Sunday night, two police officers discuss a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a classmate. The horrific crime has left the community reeling, and Detective Inspector Bascombe (Ashley Walters) believes that “it’s our job to understand why” baby-faced Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) did what he did. But his colleague, Detective Sergeant Frank (Faye Marsay) doubts such clarity is possible.

“You can’t understand why,” she responds. “Do you actually think you can?”

Adolescence was honored with eight Emmys this year, including outstanding limited series. 15-year-old Owen Cooper became the youngest male Emmy-winner in history for his haunting portrayal of Jamie Miller, a baby-faced teen radicalized by the manosphere. Stephen Graham won for lead actor in a limited series for portraying Eddie, Jamie’s well-meaning but distracted father, and for writing the series with Jack Thorne.

Set in an unnamed city in the north of England, Adolescence opens with an early-morning raid on the Miller home. Jamie, who wets himself in fear, is arrested and charged with the fatal stabbing of Katie, a girl from school. The four-part drama follows the aftermath of the murder over the following year. It is not so much a murder mystery—the identity of the perpetrator is never really in doubt, because the murder was caught on tape—as it is the story of a community grappling with an unspeakable crime.

The series was released in March to near-universal acclaim and quickly became one of the most-watched English-language series in Netflix history. Each episode was filmed in a single, uninterrupted take, a technical feat that made it nearly impossible for viewers to turn away from the painfully relevant subject matter.

Amari Bacchus as Adam Bascombe and Ashley Walters as Detective Inspector Bascombe in Adolescence. (Courtesy of Ben Blackall/Netflix © 2024)

Adolescence prompted a conversation about the corrosive influence of social media, the growing social isolation of young men and boys, and the disconnect between overwhelmed parents and their children. Prime Minister Keir Starmer invited the show’s creators to Downing Street for a conversation about the dangers of social media, and floated the idea of screening the series in schools.

Graham and his co-creator Jack Thorne were inspired to write Adolescence by a spate of murders in the U.K. involving teenage girls killed by adolescent boys. While the series was filming last year, a teenager stabbed three young girls to death at a Taylor Swift-themed event in the town of Southport, near Liverpool, and a man in Hertfordshire killed his ex-girlfriend, her sister, and mother hours after watching Andrew Tate videos online.

As Adolescence swept the Emmys Sunday night, it was hard to ignore the show’s connection to news that has dominated the headlines since last week, even if no one mentioning it onstage at the Peacock Theater: the assassination of Charlie Kirk. A conservative influencer who indoctrinated thousands of young men to the MAGA cause via social media and was a leading figure in the manosphere, Kirk was allegedly killed by Tyler Robinson, a “terminally online” 22-year-old college dropout who had few friends and is said to have played video games obsessively.

Details are still emerging about the suspect, and what may have compelled him to violence. But the finger-pointing began almost the moment Kirk was shot on Wednesday. Minutes after his death was announced, right-wing influencer and accused rapist Andrew Tate tweeted a two-word message — “Civil war” — that soon echoed across social media.

The White House is now turning his horrific, very public murder—graphic videos of which flooded TikTok, Instagram, and X last week—into its own Reichstag Fire, using it as an excuse to crack down on liberal organizations and scare people from speaking critically about Kirk’s legacy.

Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller, Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller, in Adolescence. (Courtesy of Netflix © 2024.).

Across the pond, Kirk’s death was used to mobilize turnout at a far-right rally that drew a record-setting, predominantly male crowd to central London on Saturday (the event, at which Elon Musk appeared via video, was organized by Tommy Robinson, an anti-immigrant agitator with a violent criminal record.)

It’s part of a grimly predictable routine that follows every mass shooting or high-profile act of depraved violence. We reflexively try to locate the suspect on a simplistic, left-right ideological spectrum and worry whether he—it’s almost always a “he”—is “one of ours.”

But this binary does not account for the chaotic, brain-scrambling effects of the internet. Lately, our collective attempts to politically diagnose school shooters and would-be assassins has only sown confusion.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who tried to assassinate Donald Trump last summer, was a registered Republican who made a small donation to ActBlue, a Democratic fundraising group, and once wrote about the need to “promote kindness and cooperation instead of division and anger” in American politics. More than a year after his death, we basically know nothing about why Crooks did what he did.

Kirk’s alleged killer grew up in a deeply conservative corner of a deeply conservative state, was not affiliated with a political party, and had never voted. A once-promising student, he dropped out of college and lost touch with his friends. Bullet casings found in a rifle near the scene of the murder were engraved with gaming memes and “nihilistic in-jokes” that, as my colleague Lily Conway explains brilliantly, are steeped in layers of irony that defy literal interpretation and are meant to signal belonging to an in-group.

As the liberal streamer Hasan Piker told The New York Times, “I think we’re going to see a lot more indecipherable politics around meme culture and what my generation considers to be ‘brain rot.’”

In this piece, Derek Thompson examines the phenomenon of “sad young terminally online men.” Citing research by the FBI, he writes that “modern assassins are more isolated, more disorganized, and more driven by a mosaic of views that defy easy categorization, because they emerge from texts, posts, and tabs, rather than from institutions and movements.”

The race to decipher the messages on the bullet casings—and the overly literal way many officials and journalists seem to be interpreting them—is reminiscent of a pivotal scene from Adolescence.

Bascombe is at the local high school, speaking to Katie’s classmates about what might have led to her murder, when his teenage son Adam (Amari Bacchus) pulls him aside to explain the coded emojis Katie used in messages on Jamie’s Instagram account. His father is baffled by the way young people communicate with each other.

“My brain can’t take all this,” he says.

Adam is exasperated with his father for being old and obtuse. “It was embarrassing watching you blunder about,” he says.

The lingering power of Adolescence lies in its refusal to provide easy explanations for Jamie’s crime and the circumstances that led to it. Over the course of the series, it becomes evident that Jamie was spending far too much time online and had gotten sucked into the most toxic corners of the manosphere—“that Andrew Tate shite,” as Frank puts it. But other boys at school have been exposed to the same misogynist rhetoric. Why haven’t they killed anyone?

The teachers at Jamie’s school seem too overwhelmed with discipline and beaten down by bureaucracy to serve as mentors. And Jamie’s parents are loving but seemingly too caught up in the daily grind to find time to emotionally connect with their son.

“He never left his room. He’d come home, slam the door, straight up the stairs, onto the computer,” says Jamie’s distraught mother, Manda (Christine Tremarco), during a climactic conversation with her husband in the show’s final episode. Eddie admits he naively believed Jamie was safe from harm because he was in his room. She gently concludes they could have done more to help their son—and, by extension, save Katie.

“I think it would be ok for us to think that,” she says.

Adolescence has a lot to say about the corrosive influence of the internet and the increasing social isolation of boys and young men. But it doesn’t solely pin the blame on Andrew Tate, the manosphere, or even “social media” writ large. Its disquieting message is that we are all at fault, that we all do things that have unintended consequences and could potentially contribute to an unspeakable tragedy.

“We didn’t want to be pointing a finger at anyone specifically,” Graham told a reporter on the red carpet Sunday, “Instead of saying who’s responsible, why don’t we look at it from a point of view where maybe we are all accountable…the parents, the school system…society, the government. Maybe have a look at it as a collective and let’s try and work this thing out together.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian