Originally appeared on E! Online
Less than four minutes into Netflix’s new series Adolescence, which has earned six nominations for Critics Choice Awards 2026, police break into a house on a quiet street and make an arrest on the suspicion of murder.
The suspect? A 13-year-old boy named Jamie, who’s been accused of killing his classmate Katie.
As authorities take him away, his father Eddie (played by the series co-creator and writer Stephen Graham) yells out, “He hasn’t done anything! You’re making a mistake!”
Whether or not that’s true is explored throughout the four-part British drama, which extends from the day of the arrest to 13 months later as Jamie’s parents (Graham and Christine Tremarco), detectives (Ashley Walters and Faye Marsay) and a psychologist (Erin Doherty) try to get to the bottom of what happened.
While Netflix has released several true crime series, the story of Jamie (Owen Cooper‘s breakout role) isn’t based on just one real-life person or case.
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“I was reading the paper, and there was an article about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl to death,” Graham recalled in a March 16 interview with Virgin Radio U.K. “And then a couple of months later, I was watching the news and there was a piece on there about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl to death—and these were at opposite ends of the country.”
“It hurt at my heart,” he continued. “Being a father myself, I just thought, ‘What’s happening with our young men today in society that this is becoming a regular occurrence?'” (According to figures provided by the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice, juveniles between the ages of 10 to 17 were the offenders in roughly 17 percent of the nearly 18,500 cautions and convictions made for possession of a knife or offensive weapon that were recorded in England and Wales in the year ending in March 2023).
Netflix
It’s a question Graham hopes to address, noting to Netflix’s website Tudum, that one of their aims was to ask, “What are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet, and from social media?”
And for him, it was important to show that Jamie came from a stable household so viewers could focus more on his actions versus those of his mom and dad.
“When I hear these things on the news, I know I’m not alone in blaming the parents sometimes,” the actor recently told Rolling Stone U.K. “And then I thought to myself, ‘What if it’s not the parents?'”
Taking this approach also emphasized the question, how well does a parent really know what their teen is doing?
“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,” Graham explained to Tudum. “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.”
Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
Ultimately, Graham doesn’t have a specific answer for the problems explored in Adolescence. But he hopes the show is a call to action to tackle them together.
“You know that beautiful saying it takes a village to raise a child?” the 51-year-old said on the March 14 episode of This Morning. “Well, in a way, I think we’re all slightly accountable from the side of the parenting, the school, the political structure, society itself, and then what we didn’t have when we were kids: Social media, the influence of social media, phones. They parent our kids just as much as we do today. And we’re not pointing the finger specifically at any one thing. We’re just saying, ‘Let’s talk about this. Let’s bring this into our awareness.’”
All four episodes of Adolescence are available to stream on Netflix now.
To see when more must-see shows are available, keep reading…
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Fixer Upper: Colorado Mountain House (Magnolia Network & HGTV) – Dec. 9
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Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 2 (Netflix) – Dec. 25
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Watch the Critics Choice Awards 2026 live Sunday, Jan. 4, at 7 p.m. on E! and USA Network.
