The Netflix series Adolescence starts with a police SWAT team conducting a dawn raid on a modest tract house in the north of England. But instead of drug dealers or terrorists, they are seeking a 13-year-old boy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), suspected of murdering a schoolmate called Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday). Given that Jamie’s reaction is to wet himself and cry for his dad, Eddie (Stephen Graham), who is being held at gunpoint by officers along with his wife Manda (Christine Tremarco) and daughter Lisa (Amélie Pease), the police raid seems like overkill.
But the episode ends with the arresting officers, Detective Inspector Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Detective Sergeant Frank (Faye Marsay), producing surveillance footage from the night before that shows Jamie stalking Katie, confronting her, being shoved aside by her, and attacking her with a knife. So while Adolescence unfolds like a whodunit, it is really a whydunit (spoilers ahead). Jamie’s state of mind, and the state of the world in which he and his schoolmates are struggling toward adulthood, are portrayed with such startling power that the SWAT assault seems almost justified.
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