by Ed West, Spectator
[…] Fiction has often driven social reforms, none more so than the work of Charles Dickens, whose novels also continue to colour our view of Victorian Britain more than any historian. Drama as a means of shaping the discourse has also seen a revival with last year’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, and now with the arrival of the Netflix drama Adolescence.
It is harrowing stuff, especially as a father of a boy just a bit younger than its antagonist, and Adolescence has proved a huge hit; watched by six and a half million people in its first week, the biggest ever audience for a streaming television show, it even beat The Apprentice in audience ratings. It is a credit to the writers and the actors, in particular the hugely talented Stephen Graham, who both co-wrote the drama and played the killer’s father with a rare degree of empathy.
It is also a drama quite consciously aimed at driving the discourse, which Parliamentarians have taken up with zeal. The Prime Minister announced that: ‘As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard. We all need to be having these conversations more.’ Backing Netflix’s plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, ‘so as many young people as possible can see it’, Starmer even accidentally referred to it as a ‘documentary’ in parliament before correcting himself, and then did so a second time. Kemi Badenoch, meanwhile, has been slammed by radio hosts for not watching the fictional work, one calling it a ‘dereliction of duty’. One gets the feeling that we’ll soon all be out clapping for Adolescence.
So with the backing of the Prime Minister, the programme will be watched in parliament, where the show’s creators will meet with politicians to discuss ‘online safety’. The drama will also be shown in schools as part of anti-misogyny lessons; the message behind Adolescence, that the small, weird kid is probably a demented women-hating killer, will no doubt have a very positive impact on classrooms.
You might say that ‘Britain has gone from Government-by-Newspaper-Columnist to Government-by-DocuDrama’ But, of course, there is a key difference between Mr Bates and Adolescence – the Horizon scandal portrayed in that ITV series actually happened; Adolescence is total fiction. In fact, not only did the story in the Netflix seriesnot happen, it’s not even likely to happen, as any actuary might tell you. This has not stopped the BBC reporting how the‘Netflix hit proves necessity of male role models’.
Read also: Why are we still talking about Adolescence? by Simon Evans, spiked
What is next in Britain’s TV dramocracy? A look at the series that might follow Adolescence by Ben Sixsmith, The Critic