It’s only March, but critics and viewers alike are already calling Adolescence the best show of 2025 — maybe even the best in years. This gripping new drama dives headfirst into the terrifying influence of the manosphere on teenage boys, centering on one particularly harrowing case. Across four intense, one-shot episodes, we follow the story from arrest to interrogation to therapy, piecing together how an unthinkable murder could happen. Honestly? I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
But the biggest question on a lot of fans’ minds is: Is Adolescence based on a true story? Let’s dive into the details.
Of course, this post contains SPOILERS for Adolescence.
What happens in Adolescence?
Marketed by Netflix as “every parent’s worst nightmare,” Adolescence more than lives up to the hype. Just three minutes into episode one, 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) is arrested in his own home, accused of murdering a girl from his school. He’s terrified, visibly trembling, and even wets himself out of fear. Jamie swears he didn’t do it — but damning video footage soon surfaces, showing him wandering town, meeting up with Katie (Emilia Holliday)… and then stabbing her multiple times.
The next episodes unravel the aftermath, with Jamie’s devastated parents and the police desperately trying to understand what led him to this point. His family seems perfectly normal, his life uneventful. He had friends, he wasn’t a loner. So what went so catastrophically wrong? The show pulls us into that exact question, asking: who’s really to blame, and could anyone have stopped this?
Is Adolescence based on a true story?
Let’s clear this up: Adolescence isn’t based on a single real-life case. But it might as well be. The show takes heavy inspiration from the grim reality of youth violence and the growing number of boys caught up in knife crime — especially in the UK, where the series is set.
According to the House of Commons Library, as of March 2023, there were nearly 18,500 cautions and convictions for knife possession. Shockingly, 17.3% of those were kids aged 10 to 17.
This disturbing trend stuck with the show’s co-creator and Jamie’s on-screen father, Stephen Graham. “It shocked me. I was thinking, ‘What’s going on? Why is this happening? What’s leading boys to stab girls to death?’” Graham told Netflix’s Tudum. “And then it happened again. And again. And again. I wanted to shine a light on it — to ask, ‘Why now? How did we get here?’”
Graham added, “We could’ve made a show about gangs or abusive households. But we wanted this to feel closer to home. We wanted you to look at Jamie’s family and think, ‘That could be us.’ This is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare.”
Real cases that inspired Adolescence
While Jamie and Katie’s story isn’t real, it echoes a chilling number of recent tragedies. In 2021, Jake Davison — a 21-year-old with ties to the incel community — killed five people in a mass shooting in Portsmouth. In 2023, The Independent reported that a 17-year-old girl in south London was stabbed to death after refusing flowers from a boy on her way to school.
Then there’s Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old girl lured to a park and brutally murdered by two teenagers. Graham told Radio Times, “There was another girl stabbed at a bus stop. Then Brianna Ghey. I kept thinking, ‘What the hell is happening?’”
One case the show seems particularly shaped by is the murder of 15-year-old Holly Newton. She was stabbed multiple times by her ex-boyfriend, 16-year-old Logan MacPhail. According to CCTV footage, he also wandered around town before finding and killing Holly. When police told him he was being charged with murder, he reportedly responded coldly: “Is she dead?”
The tragic stories keep piling up, and the rise of youth violence isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s running parallel to the rise of the manosphere — a toxic online world where figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson radicalize young men, teaching them that women are to blame for their frustrations. Adolescence forces us to confront this reality: Jamie could be any boy. Katie could be any girl.
Creator Jack Thorne summed it up to the BBC: “This could happen to anyone. That’s not to say anyone is capable of being Jamie — but any parent could miss the signs. Any school could fail him. And any boy could fall into the wrong ideas, the wrong voices, the wrong world.”
Adolescence isn’t an easy watch — but it’s one we desperately need.
