Julian Walker (5:28)

Yeah. So as you've said, adolescence is this riveting TV miniseries which everyone listening will already know. Just four episodes. We start off with a dramatic arrest of the young boy Jamie. It's early in the morning. Police break open the door. We are led to understand that the forcefulness of their raid is because he's accused of murdering a classmate named Katie. Episode one is all about the arrest and the booking and how the police and lawyers deal with the boy and his family who are in shock. They're trying to make sense of what has happened. By the end of that episode, we see the security camera footage that shows Jamie is in fact guilty. So this is not going to be a whodunit, more of a why did he do it?

Matthew Remsky (6:10)

Right.

Julian Walker (6:10)

The second episode then takes us into Jamie's school, looking for answers. We find rebellious kids, unruly classrooms, teachers who can't maintain control, generally bad behavior. The lead detective, Bascom, who has a son in the school, and the son clues him in on the pervasive influence of manosphere culture on the kids. More drama ensues in this episode as Bascom chases one of Jamie's classmates who has information on the murder weapon. Then we get to episode three, which is taking these two established threads, Jamie killed Katie and. And the school kids are immersed in toxic red pill Internet culture. And then exploring the connection between the two via a tense and really brilliantly acted psychological evaluation. I think this is the episode that gets the most acclaim.

Matthew Remsky (6:56)

Yeah.

Julian Walker (6:57)

An interview between the boy who's been locked up for seven months now awaiting trial, and forensic psychologist named Briony. The climactic moments here are all about Jamie's aggressive intimidation tactics. How he can flip from being a vulnerable and clueless 13 year old boy who doesn't want to answer certain questions he's looking down at his shoes into. Then adopting a super threatening posture toward this adult professional woman. He throws things, he stands tauntingly over her as she sits. He faints like he's going to hit her to see if, if she flinches when he does that. And what comes out in the interview is him accidentally confessing to the murder, which then makes him enraged again and try to take it back. As well as the story of humiliation that led to. To him committing the crime. Right. The final installment, episode four, is about Jamie's sister and his parents grieving, struggling to make sense of what has happened, taking refuge in one another as they face community shame and personal guilt, as well as the loss of the son and the brother. But it's a very explosive episode and there's controversy here in terms of what is being represented, which we'll discuss in this episode. We hear about how Jamie was always alone in his room for hours and you just don't know what they're getting up to on the Internet. And then there's indirect reference to Andrew Tate that we heard also earlier from one of the. One of the police officers as having showed up in a video on Jamie's dad Eddie's phone when he was just looking for content about the gym and how Andrew Tate was talking about how men should treat women and how men should be men and all of that.

Matthew Remsky (8:36)

Yes.

Julian Walker (8:36)

So we're left. We're left with this sense of, like, what went wrong? We were imperfect, but. But we did our best and we didn't know what was going on with him. And the, the implication seems to be it was the Internet, it was people like Tate, it was the manosphere that caused this terrible tragedy.

Matthew Remsky (8:52)

Yeah. And that's why I think we should talk on how the writer producers visualized and understood this drama and where it started. So here's Stephen Graham on the initial idea.

Stephen Graham (9:05)

I read an incident in the paper and it was about a young boy killing a young girl, stabbing a young girl to death. And then not long after that, I saw on the news on the television that, you know, it happened again in a different, completely different part of the country and a young boy had stabbed the young girl. And if I'm really honest with you, both of those incidents really hurt my heart in a way, and it just made me think, what's going on? Why? What's happened in today's society where a young boy, and they are young boys, feel a need, or this age or whatever it may be, you know, I'll never understand it to. To kill a young girl, to stab a young girl to death.

Matthew Remsky (9:49)

So Graham hasn't named the two incidents specifically, but the consensus so far is that at least one of the murders he's speaking about is the September 2023 murder of 15 year old Eliane Andam as she got off a bus in Croydon on the way to school. Her assailant, Hassan Santamu, had just turned 17. And the confrontation that morning is reported to have escalated when Andam's friend Sentamu's ex girlfriend, asked him to return some personal items, including a teddy bear that she'd given to him. Now he's been convicted of murder and sentenced to 23 years.

Julian Walker (10:30)

You have taken the life of a precious child. You have devastated the lives of those who knew and loved Eliane Andam, a bright, kind and loyal 15 year old on her way to school with her friends. The responsibility for Eliane's death will be with you for the rest of your days. The sentence's detention at His Majesty's pleasure.

Matthew Remsky (10:56)

So that's the Judge at the sentencing hearing. Now, getting wind that Graham was inspired by this story has enraged the racist sector of the manosphere because Centamou is an immigrant, immigrant from Uganda, but Jamie Miller, the perpetrator and adolescence, is a white kid from Liverpool. And so they are saying that the story is race swapped and therefore inaccurate to what's actually happening on the ground in the uk. But Thorne says that they did not want to make a story about race, but about the violence of boys against girls, regardless of race. And we'll hear from Thorne a little bit later and how he gets more specific about that. Now, the other story that Graham is probably talking about is that of Ava White of Liverpool, who was killed in November of 2021 at the age of 12 by a 14 year old boy after she asked the boy and his friends to delete a video he had recorded of her and her friends at an outdoor Christmas tree lighting event. That confrontation was over Ava not consenting to be videoed. The perpetrator, the murderer, has not been named because he's still a minor, but he's been sentenced to 13 years in prison. Now, in both cases the boys had carried knives to the scene. And in the sentencing remarks in both cases, the judges noted the precipitous rise in general UK knife violence. So that's a big background context here. And so the stats on knife crime coming from 10 to 17 year olds in the UK that, you know, they're numbering over 3,000 in the latest reporting year, which reflects a 20% increase over the past decade, but it also represents less than 20% of total knife crime. There were 55,000 attacks in total in 2024. Now for perspective and scale, deaths by knife violence in the UK are in the mid-200 each year. While let's just compare to the US in 2020, there were over 45,000 deaths by gun violence and over 73,000 gun related injuries.

Julian Walker (13:09)

Yeah. Some people who argue against gun control will say, well, if you look at the uk, they have this terrible knife problem because people don't have access to guns, they're still going to commit violent crime. Of course that, that completely falls apart when you start talking about school shootings and mass killings. I looked it up, of course it's a much bigger country, but there were also 50,000 knife cr in the US in 2024. So it's not like we get rid of the, the knife crime in exchange for gun crime.

Matthew Remsky (13:36)

It's all still happening now, whether we're talking about boys or men. Over 90% of knife crime offenders in the UK are male, but it's also true that 90% of knife crime murder victims and those hospitalized with knife injuries are male as well. So stabbing incidents in the UK are overwhelmingly male on male. And when girls or women are the victims, there is little direct evidence that online content is causal. Online influence is part of this world, but it's not the smoking gun. And so here's a moral panic red flag that neither the cases said to inspire adolescents nor the real world stats point to the influence of Andrew Tate or the manosphere in knife violence tragedies.

Julian Walker (14:26)

Yeah, and that's really important because these are awful cases that you just cited. But the impulse to find an explanation for how something so awful could possibly simply happen can easily latch onto generalized intuitions. Race, video games, social media, incel culture, the kids today, it's the lack of religious discipline, the demise of the strong father. And in that understandable reaching for answers. I think so much can get overlooked regarding other factors as well as really asking ourselves, do we have evidence for causal connections here?

Matthew Remsky (14:58)

And I think we have to be totally clear if we're not already, that none of this parsing does anything to diminish the fact that Andrew Tate is a violent and dangerous piece of shit who should walk into the ocean and never come back.

Julian Walker (15:11)

Agreed.

Matthew Remsky (15:12)

And that the manosphere should be ground to dust and that the Internet can be a dangerous place and that social media can have really bad effects on youth mental health. I don't think anybody thinks there's anything controversial about any of that. Yeah, we also can't say that there's no strong evidence for the Internet provoking some extreme act. There was a case in the uk, very famous, still, very raw. The South Asian teen who knife murdered three little girls at a dance class in Southport in January of this year. This is the incident that instigated actually anti immigrant race riots. That kid, he was 17 years old. Axel Ruta Cabana. He had dark web gore material in his search history. And incidentally, he was another focus of the race swapping conspiracy theory about the show because Q adjacent influencers Ian Miles Chong posted that Thorne and Graham had based the show on Ruta Cabana. And Elon Musk bumped that post with a wow. Which is his typical way of just bumping something without really saying anything about it.

Julian Walker (16:18)

Yeah, I mean it's, it's, it's shitty analysis. I don't know if I go so far as to say it's a conspiracy theory because these are the big events that have been in the News. And it does just so happen that the perpetrators don't match the profile of the kid who's in the show.

Matthew Remsky (16:30)

Well, yes, I mean, in the sense that they have to make up that this is the writer's intentions was to take actual real world incidents and actually flip them around. So we'll get to their intentions in a bit. And it is true that there's a legitimate Tate effect that impacts in real life domestic violence and partner crime in the UK. There was a case in July of 2024, a 24 year old former soldier named Kyle Clifford murdered his ex partner, Louise Hunt, along with her mother Carol and sister Hannah at their home in Hertfordshire. And court proceedings revealed that Clifford had watched up to 10 Andrew Tate videos along with pornography within the 24 hours before committing the murders. This is a much clearer case, causal relationship case, than anything that adolescence is pointing to. And I'm going in this direction because my concern at least is that when it comes to kids, if you overweight for Tate or other social media or Internet influence over kids, you don't have to look for other causes of resentment, alienation, mental health, stress, misogyny or rage. And you may wind up leaning into policy solutions. And Thorne is out there right now promoting mobile phone and social media bans that may continue, if not even deepen the problem. So the bottom line for me on the origin story is that Stephen Graham was really moved by two not very closely related tragedies. And then he became aware of the violence of the manosphere. And as artists do, he connected them together in a moving story that put his acting chops at the center of it all, including his past expertise with this single take format, which he worked with first in a restaurant drama called boiling point in 2021, which is like actually a really great movie. Now Graham and Thorne, it's clear, earnestly they want to answer these deep questions of who is responsible for this and where have we all gone wrong? But they've begun, unfortunately, I think, with a weak correlation to build a piece of art. And that's fair because it's art. And maybe it's worth telling a cautionary tale that the Tate effect is so powerful that any suburban white kid in the UK can be turned into a knife murderer. But what do you think, Julian?

Julian Walker (18:56)

Look, online radicalization is just such a complex topic alongside things that we cover a lot like disinformation and conspiracy mongering. I think all of it is worth looking at very carefully. Figuring out how to do good content, moderation and yeah, sure, how to Protect minors from exposure and exploitation. I think having certain kinds of rules in schools makes sense. I don't think some of the rationales are necessarily well substantiated. Clearly, as we've covered here for five years, digital disinformation has real world impacts, but these don't happen in a vacuum. I think being indoctrinated into hateful beliefs or misled by pseudoscience and conspiracy theories requires some kind of pre existing vulnerability. And that could include economic precarity, loss of community or loved ones, mental health crises, or already having some beliefs, some cognitive vulnerabilities and emotional convictions that rhyme with the new content. But I think the. The teenage or preteen boy who would stab one of his classmates to death, I. I just am not sure that's a creation of the manosphere. Rather, the boy with those kinds of tendencies, with that kind of pathology or terrible trauma history of his own, and therefore rage, might be drawn to that kind of content because of what's already going on inside him. The thing is, plenty of other boys are drawn to that stuff too, and they don't end up committing murder.

Matthew Remsky (20:20)

Right.

Julian Walker (20:21)

So I see some similarities here, Matthew, to moral panics around heavy metal music and violent films and video games and now social media. But one difference here is that people like Tate actually do advocate emotional, verbal and physical abuse of girls and women in order to get them to submit. Like Judas Priest wasn't actually saying anything like that when there was that moral panic in the 80s around this, this double suicide that happened. The manosphere does espouse a model of masculinity and control and wealth building and therefore status building that is about treating women like property, manipulating them, degrading, and then in Tate's case, sex trafficking, something that he's been charged with.

Matthew Remsky (21:07)

Yeah.

Julian Walker (21:08)

So in this way, I see Tate as a little more similar in terms of online radicalization to groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda because of the explicit glorification of and then instructions for how to enact violence within an indoctrinating worldview or belief system. And as we know, it's a small number in both of these cases who have all of the other factors in place that then make them take the most extreme actions. And that's true of these white supremacist boards. On 4chan, for example, I should add that Tate is not telling anyone to kill. I don't want to get sued for that. Andrew Tate has not told you to kill anyone. I'm more concerned actually with a generalized set of attitudes that some boys may be Learning about relationships and sex and girls from people like Tate and the rest of the manosphere.

Matthew Remsky (21:57)

Yeah, absolutely.

Julian Walker (21:59)

I do think they need to be educated about why all of that is grotesque and they need to be supported in developing more emotionally healthy ways of relating. If this story that is highlighting really sensational violence goes some distance towards having those conversations happen more so that we do get better support and education for kids, I think that's a good thing. But, you know, we're sort of betwixt and between here.

Matthew Remsky (22:35)

So getting deeper into the analysis here, I'm going to argue that the politics of the show are deceptively conservative and the aesthetics actually both express that and also cover it up. And I don't think this was intentional at all because this is what Thorne told a screening audience. This is in an article. Everything's linked in the show notes, by the way. But Julian, this is what he says.

Julian Walker (22:59)

One of our main aims is that beautiful saying, it takes a village to raise a child. We didn't want to point the blame at anyone specifically or in particular. We wanted to say that we're all accountable in many ways for this kind of thing, be that parents, teachers, government, society, community.

Matthew Remsky (23:17)

Well, he left out police and politicians, so we'll get there. But clearly I think he aspires to a holistic view, or he tried to develop one after the train left the station. Because here's something crucial about how this came together. It was on the basis of the technical success of Boiling Point's One Take method that Graham and Thorne had been asked to produce a series using the one take method. They didn't start with the idea. They were casting around for a subject. And then Graham saw these stories. They felt compelling to him. And then this is what Jack Thorne told the publication the Rap.

Julian Walker (23:54)

I didn't want to make this easy and blame the parents. I want to create a complicated portrait. He explained after a female colleague suggested he explore incel culture online. Thorne soon realized he had a starting point for Jamie's radicalization.

Matthew Remsky (24:11)

It's an interesting use of the word radicalization. You used it above to describe categorizing Tate within the sort of like structural framework of what do online cultish groups that drive people towards violence do. But when applied to Jamie, I don't know whether he's radicalized or not. Right. Like, it's totally unclear anyway. Both of these guys know how they are going to do this thing, but they don't know what it is. And they're gonna learn on the job, on one take. I guess you could Say, and so I wanna talk about that single take technique. How did it strike you, Julian?

Julian Walker (24:46)

Yeah, it's very engaging. It gives the seamless sense of being right there in the scene, in that world. You're witnessing these events without the inter disruptions of edits or fades in and out. And so there's this immersion in what's going on.

Matthew Remsky (25:02)

Yeah, it's extraordinarily compelling and I don't think it would have done as well without it. And it's a technique that goes back about 70 years. Actually. It goes by a number of names, not necessarily one take, but the principle of the least amount of camera intervention or editing intervention possible. So the objective realism technique focuses on the detached observer. There's a principle of direct cinema which strives for just minimal filmmaker intervention and then surface realism, or getting the details just exquisitely solid. And what all of these genres have in common, however, is that the inner lives of the characters are hard to access, in some cases purposefully obscured by this concentration on surfaces. So that the viewer is really prompted to kind of make armchair decisions of what's going on. And people have been doing that very much so online. So it's a filmmaking of 99% showing you and 1% or less of telling.

Julian Walker (26:07)

Yeah. It also makes me think of that whole Lars von Trier dogma kind of movement that was going on, I think, in the early 2000s or maybe the late 90s, where it's all about, you know, just wanting to show exactly what's happening. They usually didn't use music at all. It was like, we're just going to be there and move through the subject matter.

Matthew Remsky (26:28)

Right. So what I have found after watching this through a few times, is that even when the camera is able to stay with the framing of the character and with the emotions of the character, there's one big exception at the end where Stephen Graham is the focus. As a viewer, I'm already detached and I'm ready to move on with the flow of surfaces and actions. Because the camera is always on a Steadicam. It's always on a track. It's always going to be passed off to some other person. So there's this constant motion that follows clumps of characters at a time. And that tends to mean that I can't really invest in a single human being, really. It's a very passive feeling.

Julian Walker (27:14)

Yeah. It's interesting because the emergence of the Steadicam technology means that it takes us away from the old cinema verite, where it would have been a lot more shaky because the cameraman's moving around as everything is happening. It's fascinating analysis, Matthew, because it does start to sound a bit like some of what we and other people have talked about in terms of the endless scroll of frictionless social media.

Matthew Remsky (27:35)

Frictionless is a great word, actually. There's nothing that apparently gets in the way between the camera and the character. But that comes with a price because there's a real problem in adolescence when we never get clear internal access to what makes Jamie as a 13 year old murderer tick, which is what you would do with a camera, with portraiture or internal monologue or, you know, any of the other tricks that have been developed over a hundred years. We see him emotionally prodded and provoked from the outside, but he's never allowed to speak in a context of receptivity and trust. Like the camera can watch him and surveil him, but it doesn't engage, engage with him. And the Internet influence, therefore, that everyone is saying is at the heart of this show becomes this sort of off stage hearsay. You can't really show it anyway, right? You couldn't use the one take and really go into people's phone histories or whatever. And the hearsay is then coming from uninformed adults making passing comments until Adam tells his dad, Luke Bascom, the detective inspector, just the basics that the Instagram emojis left by Katie and her friends on Jamie's part. Posts of Instagram lingerie models point to tate adjacent terms like incel or the 8020 rule or the red and blue pills. You know, Luke thinks that's a matrix reference to begin with. That's how out of touch he is. We get the barest amount of human detail from this technique and yet everybody wants to leap to causes and solutions.

Julian Walker (29:11)

Yeah. Hearing you say it that way makes me also reflect on how the Internet then becomes this mysterious world that we're only hearing about. It's not something that's ever shown. None of the adults are really familiar with it at all. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing. And the contrast with everything you're describing about this one take technique would be a more novelistic kind of filmmaking where you go in and out and back and forth and you show what's happening with different characters at different times. And there's more of an opportunity to reflect on the inner lives of the characters and on how the story is experienced by everyone involved. Right.

Matthew Remsky (29:48)

Well, the screen also, in contemporary filmmaking that involves sort of Internet culture, culture also becomes like an interface screen.

Julian Walker (29:56)

Right.

Matthew Remsky (29:56)

Where the texts begin to appear on the Screen where you have, you know, bubbles and whatever. There's all kinds of ways of doing that. But actually there's this perfect usage of this technique to represent the absolute cluelessness and alienation of the adult world from the Internet, which is depicted as though it's some kind of like, you know, I don't know, faraway demon universe. Right. Filled with spiritual energies that we couldn't possibly understand.

Julian Walker (30:23)

Yeah. And so even though it's a film about this horrific influence on these kids in terms of how they frame it, we as the viewer are never actually given an experience of what that's like. No, we're not taken onto an Andrew Tate forum. No, we're not seeing. We're not seeing what. What is going on with the girls in terms of their. The social media bullying or what have you.

Matthew Remsky (30:43)

Right. So I want to get to that. That's where I want us to end, because I think that's the biggest hole. So I want to turn to three fiction choices that they make that I think Thorne and Graham make that play to their strengths, which are considerable and I admire the filmmaking. But they also muddy the water of this discussion about a piece of media that is ultimately interpretable because it is observant, because there's no sort of. There are no monologues. Right. So the first thing is that the whole first episode is this copaganda style medit on policing proceduralism. And the one take technique kind of suggests that there's an inexorable process to things like one thing has to follow another. There's going to be no forks in the road. Everything is. I mean, it mimics the sort of like relentless process that you would go through very effectively, but it also sort of. It's purpose built to this kind of perfect procedure that has to unfold in a certain way. So I really had the impression that the detectives and the intake officers and the social worker and the nurse and the strip search guys and the barrister were all doing highly refined and sensitive work to protect Jamie's dignity during his arrest intake. And that the technique was part of that.

Julian Walker (32:02)

Absolutely. I had a sense that all of these procedures were very carefully calibrated to protect the rights of the prisoner, especially of a child in an adult setting. I remember thinking, the English are probably significantly better at this than Americans. There's a real sense of civility and service within the tight concerns, constraints of a kind of respectful policing.

Matthew Remsky (32:23)

Yeah. However, it's a treatment that sets the tone for the rest of the series that kind of presents the policing and legal systems as a last line of institutional defense in a culture where parents and schools are checked out and useless, not because they're overworked or that schools are chronically underfunded, but because these days the kids are hopelessly feral and we just don't know why. It must be the phones. The thing, the problem with the fiction here is that I, like you, had this impression that, oh, they're doing this really well, they're really following the book. However, Bascom breaks a fuckton of rules throughout the show. And the most egregious one is that he hides crucial evidence from the lawyer before the interview. And this is actually a violation of the UK's police and criminal Evidence Act. Basically, the lawyer went into that interview blind and he couldn't really protect his client. Later, Bascom waylays one of Jamie's friends at school about the murder weapon, but doesn't tell him his rights and he winds up chasing him down the street and into an alleyway and forcing a confession and then a snap arrest. Now secondly, Bascom is allowed to break the rules, I think, because somebody has to. Things are really bad. And we see this in episode two when we visit Jamie's school and there's this nightmare of noise, you described it, bullying, there's stolen lunch money, evidently zero rules about mobile phone usage, endless classroom and schoolyard taunts and teachers who are. There's one exception here, and it's actually the woman who plays Stephen Graham's wife who sits with Jade. They're completely checked out. They're enraged or they're teaching kids by running in class videos.

Julian Walker (34:13)

Yeah, there's this general message throughout that we are dealing with something new and that the phones, the social media, the, the Tate effect is this. This is the ingredient X that's causing all the problems and it transcends everything else. This is a way in which we could see adolescence as perhaps. I don't want to be unfair here, but it's a little bit like an updated reefer madness, or go ask Alice or Geraldo scaring the crap out of TV viewers in the 80s about satanic ritual abuse. There's this powerful out of control phenomenon. It's sweeping across the land. As Graham says, it happened in one place and then in one completely other community. The same thing is what is going on here.

Matthew Remsky (34:53)

It's a miasma.

Julian Walker (34:54)

Yeah. And then you hear it too, in that when, when Keir Starmer is, is speaking in, in the House of Commons, you hear, you hear other. If you watch that longer video, you hear people talking about something is driving our young men to commit knife crime, like to commit horrific violence in this way. What is it? We have to understand it. There's this out of control phenomenon. It's turning kids into monsters across the land. The teachers can't handle it, parents are clueless, the brave cops have to break some rules in order to try and restore order. I don't get the sense that the filmmakers deliberately leave out political or socionomic factors. It just seems that they don't weight those as being interesting or important or pressing when compared to incel culture and online bullying.

Matthew Remsky (35:37)

And they might not know much about that stuff. I mean, they're already sort of learning on the job about incel culture. And I agree about intention. The thing is, if your mandate as an artist is to go with your instinct for compelling story making, you're going to follow your conventions, you're going to follow your own skills, your own values, you're going to follow what the Netflix algorithms demand. And I think the truth is, earnestly leaning into one path is simply going to close other pathways off. So about school. The school scenes, like on one hand I was swept up in this whole sort of Lord of the Flies pathos, but I'm also the kid of two lifelong high school teachers and I got these like, creepy, familiar feelings that the school and the teachers were getting stigmatized as ineffective. I'm like very used to that. And it's true that shitty schools exist, but so much of it is about luck and resources. I think what we're given in adolescence is a middle or lower middle class suburban school, predominantly white, but but racially mixed. And this objective realism style plus not naming the town gives the impression of this is a generic school and conditions are really bad pretty much all over. So I think a big question here, is Jamie's school typical? Is it standing in for big school? Thorne describes how he worked in a school as a learning support worker. Stephen Graham's wife, who appears in the show, she was actually a teacher. Maybe that's why she did that role so well. He's been getting emails from teachers saying, yes, bang on. But I think we have to be careful with this because schools are variable in quality. In a lot of social media comments, you'll see teachers say that the depiction was bang on. But I've also found a lot of pushback. And I spoke to one veteran teacher, 15 years in several London schools, and they told me that the Netflix school scenario was plausible, but they weren't personally familiar with it. In several different schools, if you had really bad administration and terrible luck in the teaching pool. Also, if unemployment was super high in the town, there could be this perfect storm. But then they also said that, like the notion that there was no controls on mobile phone use is just nuts because in the schools that he knows of, mobile phone use is pretty strictly prohibited. Some schools even offer daytime phone cubby lockers. And then they have these pastoral care teams who do a ton of counseling around online safety, because most of the the conflict that they have to actually mitigate happens in online chat groups between themselves, outside of school hours. So these are professionals who are very familiar with all of this material. Now, another source that I talked to said that the feral school scene seemed outdated by a number of decades. And these days there tends to be a lot of centralization, a lot more sort of control and disciplinary work, a lot of work prep as well, and then sharply increased academic pressure through a reformed program called the General Certificate of Secondary Education exams, which started in 2017. And actually there are education critics in the UK who report that it's actually this heavier discipline, which has been dubbed by some the cult of the exam, is causing its own mental health spikes in the high school population. So secondary schools in England are good or they're not great. Some might be bad, some might be lucky, some might be unlucky. But what we do know is the following. Between 2009 and 10 and 2019 and 20, secondary school spending per pupil decreased in the UK by 9% in real terms, marking the most significant reduction since Thatcher's 1980s. There have been some attempts to reverse this, but funding levels have not returned to their 2010 peak. That's 50 years ago. Also, over the past decade, UK secondary school teachers have seen a 13% reduction in their salaries compared to 2010, 15 years ago, 13% less than what they were making in 2010. Recruitment and retention are in the tank. Nearly a third of teachers who qualified in the last decade have left the profession. In December of 2024, the government proposed a 2.8% pay increase for all public sector workers, including teachers. Major unions said the offer was shite. The cost of living rises. So that is a big part of the context. And we're not going to get any of that from a piece of art. But I wanted to make sure that it's out there because we have all of these sort of ideas about what institutions are doing. And especially given my own sort of family background, I'm very, very particular about. Okay, well, if you're going to depict schools in a particular Way, where are you actually going to assign some kind of responsibility? Okay. The third thing I wanted to bring up in terms of, like, the fictional choices issue is the third episode, which I think, Julian, you said that it was the most lauded or the most noted, and it is riveting. It's super painful. The psychologist's name is Briony Ariston. She's hired by the family to hopefully bolster Jamie's not guilty plea. However, to do it, she has to contrive a therapeutic alliance. She has to, I would say, because she knows that the task is limited. She only has like five appointments or whatever. She has to pretend to be attuned to his needs instead of assessing whether or not he's incompetent. And from my reading, I think he can feel it. And it scrambles him to the point of confessing and aggressing and raging at her. And she winds up playing a kind of symbolic surrogate mother figure, like the one parental figure in the institutional complex that could possibly do something for him, except that she's not ultimately responsible for his care. And I think we're meant to understand a lot about Jamie from this interaction, but he remains a black box because, partly because of the film technique, but also partly because she has very specific answers that she needs and she's not really going to go that far with unfolding his sort of. Of inner life. She has some cueing questions, but they're really about reality testing. And so I think he remains in a black box except for the betrayal and abandonment he shows when she cuts it off, which is really horrible. I mean, he knows that it's going to be over and it ends with, you know, but what, what, how do you actually assess me? What do you think of me as a human being? Am I okay? Do you like me? Do you like me? And she cannot answer. Answer. She can't. She has to go. She has to go. And so here's my problem with. We're going to talk about whether or not this series belongs in schools. But if you showed that episode in a secondary school and there were boys who might benefit from therapy watching that episode, would they be encouraged to take the risk? Ongoing.

Julian Walker (43:16)

You just black pilled them.

Matthew Remsky (43:18)

Well, I mean, what is on offer there except a sort of, I don't know, engaged and apparently warm extension of the surveillance state? Like, what is actually going on there? It's supposed to feel like caregiving, and it can't because she's testing, she's testing him. And that's all we see. I mean, Maybe he's getting good therapy, you know, in other regards, at the, at the detention center. I don't know. But yeah, it was very, very sort of chilling to me. What did you think of that one?

Julian Walker (43:51)

Well, you know, reflecting on it right now as we're, as we're covering it, it is the most sustained depiction of how a female experiences the misogyny and aggression that the, the boy has been, we're led to believe. Right. Indoctrinated into.

Matthew Remsky (44:17)

Right.

Julian Walker (44:18)

So that's interesting. But yeah, I'm absolutely right there with you. It is a. It is a procedural kind of legal interrogation dressed up in therapeutic clothing, and it's, it's uncomfortable.

Matthew Remsky (44:40)

So, Julian, in our last segment here, I want to turn to the question of how did Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, with all of their talent, all of their resources, how did they do with the stated intentions here and where do they want it to go? So there's this great interview that Thorne gave on the newsagents, great journalism program in the uk and we'll listen to a couple of parts of it. So here's the first part bit.

Jack Thorne (45:05)

I hope it's the beginning of a discussion. And listen, we don't have any answers here. And we're not saying this is some sort of documentary that takes you inside. What we wanted to do with this drama was pose a question and we wanted to understand violence towards girls by boys. You know, specifically, I'm saying not men towards women, boys towards girls. And we wanted to get inside that problem and we wanted to make it as complex as possible.

Matthew Remsky (45:35)

Okay. I think it's really interesting that they really want to look at violence towards girls by boys and not men towards women, because I think that actually the backdrop of their sort of causal suggestions is violence against men, of men against women in general. Like, that's. If they want to connect it to the manosphere, then that's, that's what they have to do. And I don't feel like we learn that much about how the Tate or Manosphere content is absorbed and weaponized within this kid group and against whom, because it goes in a couple of different directions. The writers almost send us in a really interesting direction by having Katie instigate the humiliation connected to the murder. She's the one that suggests that Jamie is an incel in the Instagram comments. And the reason that I say that I, that that's interesting is, is absolutely not to suggest that like, you know, some. Somehow she is to be blamed or something like that, but to imagine what it would be like for a 13 or 14 year old girl to actually flip that language back upon the aggressor and to use it in a defensive manner. But they don't really explore that. They leave that hanging. Thorne says in an interview that they didn't want to fall back on the trope of the perfect victim. And they didn't. But they also didn't give her a voice at all. We have no idea what was going on for Katie or for Jade.

Julian Walker (47:12)

Yeah. And as we've already covered, the connections they're making are very tenuous. They're not supported by the evidence, they're not reflected in real life events that they point to being inspired by. So a lot of the choices are more reflective of their dramatic intuitions and as we'll discuss, perhaps their personal biases or limitations.

Matthew Remsky (47:32)

Right. Which then gets reflected in the sort of online discourse. Right. It's a fascinating kind of media event that way.

Julian Walker (47:39)

Yeah, yeah. And I'll just say too, in preparation for this, I watched one of the British morning TV shows and they dedicated at least 30 minutes, excuse me, 30% of the segment to discussing which emojis should parents be on the lookout for if they wanna understand how dangerous the online space is for their kids.

Matthew Remsky (47:58)

And that is utterly, utterly hope hopeless. Because whatever the emoji vocabulary is right now, it's going to change next week. And it's not the fucking emojis, guys. Okay? Anyway, we do have Jade, who is Katie's friend, and she is given good screen time, but the camera only really records her despair and rage. She's not in any position to offer any insight. Like Adam, who's Bascom's son, she is so far from being able to trust the adults around her that it's hopeless to glean anything from the impassive camera. Thorne did say in one interview I heard that he wished he'd had more time to spend on Jade. And I really empathized when I heard him say that because I realized like, oh, you know, however you get into that business and however, you know, the budget shakes down and whatever the producers say you have time for, you're gonna have to make really, really hard decisions. So no girl, therefore in the scenario is given space to tell us what that content feels like to them, what it does to the boys around them and how they respond to it and perhaps flip it around to use it in defense. Yeah.

Julian Walker (49:13)

And it feels like the only way they were able to put some of that in, for whatever reason, is we see how angry she is and we see that she lashes out at Ryan physically. And so that gives us a sense of, like, how this must be for her. But that's. It's pretty quick, right?

Matthew Remsky (49:31)

Yeah. So we have desperate rage from her. And, you know, speaking of choices, I just think it would have taken about two minutes to script some description from her about how Katie and her and possibly other girls were impacted by the pre murder attitudes. So there's an absence there. Then when we have Jaime under psychological evaluation for an hour or more, we don't learn much about how the contact has impacted him. Maybe we're supposed to surmise that when he menaces Briony that he's cosplaying Tate, but honestly. And then I think this is what the fourth episode does. He could have easily picked some of that up from his dad. I'll say more about that. But this kind of ties into Thorne's insistence that he's focused on boys versus girls and not men versus women. Because, you know, I just don't think you can separate those.

Julian Walker (50:22)

Yeah. So I want to be cautious here because we don't actually see anything exactly like this from his dad that shows that level of menacing intimidation towards women. Or do we?

Matthew Remsky (50:35)

Well, I definitely see in the fourth episode this barely controlled embodied rage that is so normalized that Manda and Lisa are obviously used to avoiding and pacifying it. They have all kinds of strategies for sort of keeping him at a simmer instead of boiling over. And their management of him is like the entire focus of the last episode. And I think that's a. That's a. It's a terrible lost opportunity. I'll get to that at the end.

Julian Walker (51:02)

Yep, yep.

Matthew Remsky (51:03)

So. So Thorne goes on to say the following.

Jack Thorne (51:06)

Stephen had one stipulation right at the beginning of the writing process, which is, we're not going to blame the parents. We're not going to do a drama which says someone does this because they've got an alcoholic father who hits them, or they've got a mother that controls them, or any of those sorts of tropes, because his belief, my belief is that things are a lot more complex than that.

Matthew Remsky (51:30)

I think the ironies here are twofold. First of all, I think it's ironic to talk about not blaming the family because Graham becomes the singular focus of the last episode, driven by the weight of familial shame and guilt. There are no scenes for institutional or structural consideration. There's no meeting with the school pastoral care worker. There's no interview or speech from a local politician. I think with a one take technique, you could probably have some official on television in a room, as you were passing by, giving some sort of analysis of the thing. There's no confrontation with a manosphere influencer or tech administrator. There's no conversations between. I think this is the most important part. Just women and girls about self defense, defense and mutual aid. So the focal point of episode four has to be the nuclear family, which, you know, they've been displaced from Liverpool. They're far away from their extended family and their community. They don't really feel at home where they are. They feel like they are sort of, you know, fish out of water in whatever this neighborhood is. Now, I'm not saying that the writers would have to do any or all of these things, but they. They just make choices that. That I think don't line up with their int. And then the second irony is that Eddie clearly has anger issues. I've seen comments using terms like toxic, abusive, violent outbursts. Lisa and Manda have to do whatever they can to walk on eggshells. They have to manage him the entire day to find the perfect activity. They have to do their best to keep him together. And I don't get the impression that this is the first time like this is something that they're actually skilled, that.

Julian Walker (53:16)

Yeah, yeah, it's a tough one. I mean, we. We're talking about a character in a drama who's going through incredible stress and a family trying to love one another and sort of stick together through that devastating loss. The confusion, the guilt that they all feel, the social shame, because then you have this. The sense that they're being singled out and the van is being spray painted. I think what the filmmakers wanted to depict was a dad being emotionally distraught who doesn't have good tools to manage what has happened.

Matthew Remsky (53:44)

Right.

Julian Walker (53:45)

I don't think the filmmakers want us to see him as abusive in a way that played a role in the son's crime. I feel like that's fairly explicit. But I do get the critique that says, look, in real life, dads who act this way can be scary and they can have a really big impact on their families. And I do hear the comment that says, well, who knows what's going on that we're not being shown Well.

Matthew Remsky (54:08)

I really think it's a Rorschach test for people's family experience and what they have radar for. I think there's a certain gender divide between how this is viewed and how suspicious people are of Eddie's behavior. I mean, people will have very different views on what a family trying to love each other looks like. And, you know, I do think that there's a good amount of feedback to show that there's a difference between what Graham and Thorne want and what comes across for many viewers. I don't think if they looked at that in post and they said, said, wow, are people going to say that Eddie was extremely abusive and that that's the source of the, of, of some of the, the violent outbursts that, that Jamie expressed? I don't think they answered that question. And if they, if they had, before shooting that last episode, maybe there would have been some other things thrown in. I don't know. So Eddie confesses his own history of intergenerational ability abuse, and he also asserts that he's tried to do better than his own dad. I think this is like a focal point that a lot of. It's like a touchstone for a lot of people who, who really want to maintain their attunement with that character, their. Their identification with them. They want to say, I know people like that and they're not bad people. Yeah, but my question for the writers and for the people who love that sort of depiction is like, what makes us believe that Eddie, Eddie actually accomplished that or that. That he really drew down the intergenerational violence given the behavior that we see?

Julian Walker (55:47)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, we've been offering plenty of critiques here, and I'm in alignment with a lot of what you're referring to. I still think for me, in the final episode, if Eddie had beaten his kid, if this character had beaten his kid, let alone abused him in the ways that none could imply, which is the word that gets spray painted on his work van. The rawness of the interactions we're being shown to me would have meant just dramatically, just structurally, in terms of the story, that his wife or daughter would have yelled that to him in that moment. It's just too powerful of a dramatic climax to leave it out if that was really the case. So what we're given instead is this imperfect working class English guy who's likely never done therapy or any kind of personal growth. He's a product of his society. He's overwhelmed by massive stress, and he's telling us very intensely that his dad beat him and he promised he would never do that to his kids. So in this particular scene of this piece of fiction, I walk away believing that character, but I understand how triggering that probably is for some other viewers.

Matthew Remsky (56:53)

Well, and if you have that experience, you might not believe him to be a reliable narrator of his own sort of Behavior like, oh, and I also, I didn't assume that Nonce referred to Jamie as a victim that I thought that they might go take a left turn into, oh, we're going to find out that there's something hidden about Eddie's life that people in the town are actually aware of and that they're trying to expose now and this is the way they're gonna do it.

Julian Walker (57:23)

Oh, so like maybe this is why they left Liverpool.

Matthew Remsky (57:26)

Right, Exactly. And, and we can't go back there. He keeps saying we can't go back there. And then the other thing is when you say, well, they would have yelled that at him. They would have put that back in his face. Domestic violence can further suppress family members capacity to speak. So like yes, in real life.

Julian Walker (57:49)

Yes, yes. I'm just saying in terms of what we're being shown, I would think that's too great an opportunity for one of them to break through and say, no, you actually are awful and you did do these things that you're saying you didn't do.

Matthew Remsky (58:00)

Gotcha. Okay.

Jack Thorne (58:01)

You didn't know it was going to be as big. Why do you think it's become as big? I think because everyone making it and I accept myself from this is very good. So, you know, it's a well made show. It's tapped into something quite primal which is people's fears of what happens when teenagers doors are closed. And that is the key to it, isn't it? It's the idea that they are in this hidden world. It's not like they're down at the park playing football or with their mates kind of at a chess competition or whatever it happens to be.

Matthew Remsky (58:35)

Well, you used to worry about your kid going out at night and now.

Jack Thorne (58:38)

You worry about your kid staying in at night.

Matthew Remsky (58:41)

I agree with Thorne here that children have secret lives. They always have secret lives.

Julian Walker (58:46)

Yeah. Inevitably our children will have secret lives. I still think it's worth saying that there is something new about the Internet and social media and smartphones that amplifies an aspect of that secrecy in an undeniable way. Otherwise the moral panic wouldn't have any appeal. Right. It wouldn't have any soil to land on.

Matthew Remsky (59:04)

Well, okay, as fellow children of the 1980s, Julian, maybe you're familiar with being out of the house for 12, 14 hours at a time. So I started riding the subway here in Toronto when I was 7 years old so I could be downtown, 14, 15 years old. My parents would have literally no idea where I was in the city. There were payphones. If I was in trouble. I had a quarter sewn into the hem of my pants. I could use the pay phone. I find that, you know, like, if I wanted to have access to pornography, I would steal myself into an adult bookstore and nobody would know except the owner of the store who might kick me out. So I don't know. There's something about the surveillance culture for young people that's actually skyrocketed and yet we have almost an accelerated concern over what exactly are they getting into. And I wonder if it's not a situation of we all know too much about what we ourselves are doing. You know, it's like I'm taking in so much data and it's bothering me. I wonder how much my children are taking in. But like, you can at this point open a YouTube account for your kids with restrictions on it. We haven't done that because they're quite restrictive. But what we do do is that both of the kids are on my YouTube account, which totally screws up my algorith. But it also kind of cross pollinates their algorithm because they'll get like documentaries on anti fascism and stuff like that. But like I can literally go through their histories.

Julian Walker (60:56)

Yeah.

Matthew Remsky (60:56)

Going back weeks to see what they have encountered in their world. Like, I just, I don't use that in a suppressive way at all. Occasionally there's something to discuss and I'll bring it up in some kind of, you know, some kind of surreptitious way. But like, yeah, it's. I don't really. There's something about this that isn't checking out for me.

Julian Walker (61:18)

I hear you.

Matthew Remsky (61:19)

We have a lot of insight into what our children are doing, actually more than ever before.

Julian Walker (61:23)

Yeah. You know, I think because our kids are different ages, we're at slightly different points in this journey.

Matthew Remsky (61:30)

Right.

Julian Walker (61:31)

So my kid is just at the beginning because she's just about to turn seven and so I have all of that sense of trepidation about the unknown and oh, how do we protect her? You have kids who are a little older and so you have much more experience with regard to all of this, with the Internet, with phones, with gaming. And so it's actually really good to hear your perspective.

Matthew Remsky (61:54)

I hope I'm not hopelessly positive, but my experience so far is that the Internet is part of the world and the same rules apply with regard to relating to your kids. It's not some deeper mystery than we've really faced before. There are more extreme cul de sacs for sure. You know, there's no way that I could have accessed dark web content by traveling downtown with a quarter in my pocket. But those are very sort of outlier, I think, examples and experiences. But getting back to what Thorn is saying about the success of the series, he's saying that there's something really primal. And I think that there's is the primal thing is that we have a desire to locate violence and dysfunction in something simple and also somewhere else to externalize it. And in this case, like, something feral is at the school or something is floating around and it looks like Andrew Tate. I think it's much harder to locate violence in domestic relationships or in government policies that exacerbate isolation and alienation, which is why I think this series is a useful thing for Keir Starmer to focus on. During question period in Parliament, I wanted to wrap up because I think it's worth engaging this series as a fiction, as a piece of drama that has all of these political and educational implications. Now, is it going to be shown in schools? I think that's a bad idea. Is it going to be shown to parliamentarians? Probably not great either. Without, you know, a lot of, I don't know, guided discussion or something like that. But because it's such a powerful piece of art, I was thinking, okay, well, you've complained enough about it. What would you do in that last episode that would start to address these questions of especially, like, how do we understand teenagers lives? And if you're going to have a female murder victim at the center of the series, are you going to learn something about female girls? Are you going to actually learn something? And so I came up with this alternate episode four. Possibility would have required different writers and directors, but I think that it could have been a single take run through Lisa's day on that same Eddie's 50th birthday or around that time.

Julian Walker (64:27)

Okay. And this is the sister of the boy.

Matthew Remsky (64:30)

The sister, right? Yeah. So nobody has been in Jaime's room. He's been away for 13 months. She finally screws up her courage and she goes in. She doesn't know what she's gonna find. She knows that she wants to understand something. She looks through his online history and begins to piece things together. This is where we see what he has been looking at and what it means. This is where we hear, what does Andrew Tate say about women and violence? This is where we understand how this stuff is networked. Then she goes and tracks down Jay because she wants to learn more about what Jade was talking about with Katie. And so the camera can follow Lisa to their meeting. At a park. You know, she can ask Jade questions about, like, how did Katie absorb the harassment? Because this whole thing started because a sexting photograph of Katie got leaked to the friend group, and then she was harassed. Did Katie have anyone else to talk to? How did it feel for them as girls to be exposed to manosphere content? And then Lisa could take a bus to the detention center to visit Jamie. They might talk quietly about what actually happened. And I think she might be in the position for him to trust her. Trust her enough to be transparent. You know, she knows who he is. She's from the family, and she can be some sort of bridge, I think. And maybe that conversation motivates the guilty plea. Maybe that's the climax. You know, she leaves the prison, or maybe she travels home and we see her talking quietly with mom about everything that she learned.

Julian Walker (66:13)

So Netflix producers Matthew Remsky is available for Adolescence season two. I. I must say that he's contractually obligated to share his earnings from that with the conspirituality team.

Matthew Remsky (66:25)

Very good.

Julian Walker (66:26)

Feel free to email us@conspiritualitymail.com yeah.

Matthew Remsky (66:30)

So, Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, wonderful artistic work. It's really hard, I think, to do something like this with all of the challenges that we've covered. And, yeah, hopefully this criticism is positive and constructive.

Julian Walker (66:59)

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