After Adolescence, Courts and Governments Are Making Social Media Pay for What Parents Cannot See

The police arrive at dawn. They break down the front door of an ordinary family home, and a 13-year-old boy wets himself in fear as armed officers fill his bedroom. Jamie Miller is arrested for the murder of a girl from his school. His father, Eddie, and his mother, Manda, had believed their son was safe every night, upstairs, behind his own door.

That is the opening of Adolescence, the four-part Netflix drama created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham. Each episode is filmed in a single continuous shot, so you never get the relief of a cut. In the second episode, the detective leading the case only understands what happened after his own teenage son explains the coded emojis that classmates had posted under the murdered girl's Instagram photos. The adults in the story had the evidence on screen and could not read it.

Adolescence premiered on 13th March 2025 and became Netflix's second most-watched English-language series, with 66.3 million views in its first two weeks. Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie, became the youngest man to win an acting Emmy, at 15. The series won four Golden Globes in January 2026, and Graham has said he and Thorne may return to it in three or four years. Netflix made the series available free to secondary schools in the UK.