How “Adolescence” offers us a peek inside the machine

I wrote about Adolescence – or rather the (manufactured) hype surrounding it – last week. I thought at the time I’d said all that needed to be said. It is just some Netflix show, after all.

But then the hype keeps going, and the messaging piles up, and you realize it’s actually a really neat case study in The Way Things Work.

As a quick catch-up for the fortunate few yet to have Adolescence forcibly crammed in front of their eyes, the show is about a boy who stabs a girl at school. It’s said to raise “important questions” about misogyny and toxic masculinity and “the knife crime epidemic” and social media and blah blah blah blah blah.

Who cares. I haven’t watched it. It doesn’t matter. Like I said, it’s a case study.

The show was released three weeks ago…then it was everywhere. And I mean everywhere. It was reviewed and praised and praised and reviewed.

And everyone in those everywhere places called it “important” or “vital” or claimed it “asked big questions”.

You all know what those phrases mean.

Suddenly, the creators were on Newsnight on the BBC, Good Morning Britain on ITV, and even CNN.

And what were they talking about?

Politics, obviously. Knife crime and social media and online radicalisation and yet more blah blah blah.

The writer essentially said the same thing all the time, begging the government to “consider quite serious change”.

Before the week was over – as we covered before – an MP was asking if it should be required viewing in schools.

Sky News claimed that “pressure was mounting” for a social media ban. They don’t say from whom, and it doesn’t matter. It’s all a narrative, no more real than the show itself.

Netflix have since said they will provide it for free to schools to show to young boys:

This all culminated in yesterday’s meeting, where the creators of the show – along with representatives from a “healthy relationship” charity Tender – were invited to Number 10 to talk about “the influence of toxic material online” and the “serious change” they think the government needs to take.

Sir Keir Starmer (or the intern running his account) pledged to “tackle” the “challenges raised by adolescence” in a tweet…

The challenges raised by Adolescence aren’t something we can simply legislate for — if I could pull a lever to solve it, I would.

It’s only by listening and learning from the experiences of young people and charities that we can tackle this.

That’s what I’ve been doing today. pic.twitter.com/bU5ocwpa1T

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) March 31, 2025

We’re mere inches away from actual legislation based almost entirely on the made-up events of a fictional TV show.

People are rightly pointing this out as ludicrous – and it is – but that’s seeing it backwards. We’re not getting laws passed because of TV shows, we’re getting TV shows made so they can pass laws.

The studio behind Adolescence gets government funding, as does Tender, the charity that was also invited to that absurd meeting.

Netflix’s finances have been a source of speculation for years, but its political associations, alongside a track record of producing content that perfectly fits a mainstream agenda, really speaks for itself.

Government, charities, corporate media. It’s all one organism.

Does that mean the show itself was cynically produced to fill a need and sell an agenda?

Absolutely certainly yes.

But that’s not to say the actors and writers and celebrity spokespeople don’t genuinely believe in the supposed message. Just that, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky, if they didn’t believe it they would never be where they are.

They’re working for a distributor with massive and obvious ties to the Deep State, making a project for a studio that gets government funding, working alongside a charity that also gets government funding all so they can tell the government to take the kind of “drastic action” they’ve been planning to take the whole time.

They might believe they are speaking truth to power. In reality, their sincere-but-shallow ego-driven virtual signaling is being manipulated so they will tell power exactly what it wants to hear.

It’s like wheels thinking they move the car against its will, when anyone watching the machinery from the outside can plainly the whole point of the car is turning the wheels to make itself move.

This kind of compartmentalization is how the machinery works, and it’s why it’s largely pointless to ever attack actors or celebrities as Deep State assets. Most of them probably are, but the vast majority don’t know that they are, and the people either willing or able to make that realization were weeded out a long time before they got famous.

And now comes the win-win-win of it all.

The cast and crew get fame and acclaim. The studio get profit and kudos. The government get their new law.

And that’s that.

The hype around Adolescence is not new or even especially exceptional, but it is so transparent it offers a useful insight. Like an underwater aquarium, one of those glass-sided ant farms or those cadavers that have wax pumped into their veins.

It let’s us see inside a little deeper than usual, and show’s us how the machinery works.