Adolescence

This series absolutely destroyed me. I was left in tears at that final episode, like, this one-take format for all these four episodes is really able to entrance you emotionally. They all play this same role of setting the scene, edging you closer to the characters. As the episode presses on, characters unfurl and it really starts to feel less like you’re watching a show and they become truly real raw human beings. I understand there is a lot that isn’t being brought to the story-line and, from the first episode, you expect a lot to be revealed, I mean, there could of been so many episodes, but, what they do decide to provide gives enough pieces cleverly on what’s been happening off-screen. It’s interesting how this series initially sets itself up feeling police procedural, but really gets into its psychological elements a bit more and really places itself into a social/cultural context of the radicalization of young men into misogynistic ideologies.  And, it’s really impressive, how it frames this through a generational context, now in something deep like “oh his dad was this and that”, but just simply how it allows us to understand, sociologically, how men can fall into toxicity, believing this to be a accurate depiction of their gender role. There is certainly more that could’ve been provided here with that, but it does the absolute amount required to identify the grief that’s felt with this gender role when it fails a future generation. This is also culturally placed well where it has become so outside of the hands of parents/teachers/other adults in children’s lives as…the internet has become a place where propaganda or deeply offensive content is easily accessible to the ignorance of a child.