Is Netflix’s Adolescence Based on Real Adolescents?
Adolescence opens with a dramatic arrest: 13-year-old Jamie is accused of stabbing his classmate Katie to death. The four-part British series — which dropped on Netflix on March 13 and topped the streaming platform’s most-watched show list that weekend, according to the BBC — already has famous fans. Paul Feig praised the first episode as “one of the best hours of television” he’s ever seen, while Jeremy Clarkson joined viewers in expressing amazement and confusion over the show’s use of a drone in the second episode. (Every episode of Adolescence is shot in one continuous take.) But it’s not just the technology that the internet is curious about. Many people online are also wondering whether this crime drama is a work of true-crime. Andrew Tate is name-dropped, and he’s real whether we like it or not — but is the main murder plot of this series also based in reality? Below, what co-creator and star Stephen Graham has said about the inspiration behind Adolescence.
Does Jamie have a real-life counterpart?
Not directly. Jamie’s story itself is not based on a specific person or event, but per Birmingham Live, Graham noted that real reports of knife crime did give him the idea for what the series would be about. “I’d read an article in the paper about a young boy stabbing a young girl, and it made me feel a bit cold,” he said. “Then about three of four months later, there was a piece on the news about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl.”
He told Tudum that learning about that first stabbing “shocked” him and made him wonder what was going on in society. “And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again,” he recalled. “I really just wanted to shine a light on it, and ask, ‘Why is this happening today? What’s going on? How have we come to this?’ ”
So youth knife attacks are a concern in the U.K.?
Yes, and increasingly so. Graham told The Hollywood Reporter that there is an “epidemic of knife crime amongst young, young lads … up and down the country.” According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of knife attacks in England and Wales has almost doubled in the past 10 years. Meanwhile, Ministry of Justice data for the year ending in March 2023 shows that 17.3% of the roughly 18,500 cautions and convictions made for possession of a knife or offensive weapon were offenders ages 10 to 17.
Adolescence’s release follows the January sentencing of an 18-year-old to at least 52 years in prison for killing three young girls last summer at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event in Southport when he was 17. The series was “conceived and written months before” that attack, according to Entertainment Weekly, but the subject material unfortunately continues to feel timely. The Official for National Statistics reported in February that 83% of teenage homicide victims in England and Wales were stabbed to death during the year ending in March 2024; according to the BBC, the data showed that teens were more likely to be killed with a sharp instrument over any other age group. As recently as last week, an 18-year-old was sentenced to at least 23 years in prison for fatally stabbing a 15-year-old girl in London when he was 17.
Do we know anything about the inspiration for Jamie’s parents?
Graham has not named any specific direct inspirations, but he has said that his own reaction to knife attacks shaped the way that Jamie’s family is portrayed in the series. He told The Hollywood Reporter that people “blame the mom and dad” when they hear this type of news involving kids from “council estates,” or British public housing. He admitted that he himself is sometimes “guilty” of falling into this line of thinking. However, he told Rolling Stone UK and Drama Quarterly that questioning that initial instinct made him decide to focus on what was happening with Jamie and not have the parents be violent or alcoholics. “I wanted the dad to be a hardworking man,” Graham noted, “the kind of man that I was brought up with, like my uncles and my dad, who used to go to work at, like, six in the morning and not get home till 8 o’clock at night, Monday to Friday.”
And was that an Andrew Tate reference?
Yup. Much to the displeasure of some of his fans, Adolescence name-drops self-proclaimed misogynist and far-right star Andrew Tate when a detective brings up the potential role of the involuntary celibacy subculture. In GQ, Graham credited co-writer and co-creator Jack Thorne for coming up with the “incel stuff” in the series and doing research about online radicalization.
Meanwhile, Graham first learned about Tate through his kids. “I was looking online at a workout thing that our [son] Alfie sent me, and it was a good workout,” he told Rolling Stone UK. “Three or four days later, the algorithm — which I don’t understand — showed me the same gentleman again, and he was telling me his misogynistic opinions and views.” In his GQ interview, Graham added that his daughter Grace was the one who then identified Tate and explained who he was. “And then I thought, Well, I’m a semi-put-together 51-year-old man who knows a little bit of who I am and what I’m about,” he said. “So what if I was a 13-year-old boy who didn’t have the greatest relationship with my father, didn’t really have that solid connection with a role model, and was finding my feet out there?”
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