Before I watched Adolescence, I saw a storm of articles and posts touting it as necessary, important, crucial for understanding the misogynist radicalisation of young boys.

The miniseries is centred around thirteen-year-old Jamie, who gets radicalised online and murders a female classmate. It shows Jamie’s capture by the police, the aftermath at school, his session with a psychologist, and his family spending the day together — all of which offer partial explanations for what he did. Yet the show is vague in many ways, and references incel culture only tangentially, leaving Jamie’s life before the murder comparatively unexplored — which might be why people find it so easy to project things onto it. Incredibly, one article brought this to its apex under the title “You don’t have to watch Adolescence to learn from it”.

As with every piece of art lauded to this extent, the gushing exhortations that I must watch Adolescence prepared me for a letdown. Not just from a contrarian refusal to do what I’m told, but because art described in this way is often didactic, simplistic and overly reliant on dialogue. Adolescence isn’t the worst offender, but its eagerness to deliver a message creates some eye-rollingly unsubtle artistic choices. In the final episode, for instance, the dad paints over the graffiti on his van, an event later punctuated by the song lyric “scars we cover up with paint.” The dad cries on his son’s empty bed, tucks in his soft toy, and then — in case we didn’t get it — says: “I’m sorry son, I should have done better.” One cop says to another “It’s our job to understand why [he killed her].”

You get the picture, repeatedly.

Labelling art you enjoy as required viewing presumes your own tastes are universal, and usually seems directed to a prospective audience whose knowledge or values need to be pulled up to scratch. Moreover, it’s not a viable statement for every type of artwork. Last year I read Alison Rumfitt’s second horror novel Brainwyrms. Passages of it were so disgusting that I recoiled from the page, hoping not to throw up — the highest possible praise for a body horror novel. But while Rumfitt’s work paints compelling pictures of transphobic English fascism, horror fans are less likely to discuss the genre as essential or crucial. Unlike diehard fans of neoliberal smarm like Parks and Recreation, we recognise that disturbing and gross art isn’t for everyone. Rumfitt’s art is neither didactic nor simplistic, but given some viewers’ drive to dogpile artists for art they deem unsafe, the climate is clearly increasingly hostile to art that doesn’t double as an instruction manual.

Where does this tendency come from — to treat artists as social workers or carers whose obligation is to guide us towards better decisions? One breathless writer argued that “Adolescence is such powerful TV that it could save lives”. This quasi-religious view of media is why didactic art is hyped up so much; its lack of ambiguity means all viewers will come to the same, useful conclusions as I did, right? It’s an understandable reach in an isolating and over-mediated world, where a quarter of older people in Scotland listed the TV and radio as their primary companions. Maybe we can’t give people friends or social neighbourhoods or community centres, but at least this TV show might turn them around.

This seems to be why the show’s creators called for the show to be screened in Parliament and schools, a campaign promoted in the Commons by MP Anneliese Midgley. Keir Starmer backed her call, saying that “as a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.” Although Starmer doesn’t have the final word, we should understand what parts of it are friendly to his beliefs.

Given how almost all commentary on the show focuses on online misogynist radicalisation and its consequences, I was surprised that most of what actually happens in Adolescence, bar the final episode, is police procedure. The first episode opens with police officers preparing for home invasion. It revolves around reading Jamie his rights, taking fingerprints and bloodwork, being strip-searched, having a lawyer advise him (inconsistently) for the interrogation. Despite the interesting cinematography and good acting, I kept waiting for characters to care about. Instead I was given long scenes in which cops assured the boy’s lawyer of their due diligence.

Regardless of what Adolescence intends, it functionally portrays the police as an imperfect but necessary system for dealing with misogynists. This is, of course, the same police force that employed Wayne Couzens, who kidnapped and strangled Sarah Everard in 2021. The same force that then brutalised feminist protesters in the wake of her murder. When Adolescence portrays the strip search as degrading but done as politely as possible, viewers are invited to think about how horrible everyone feels about these necessary precautions against killers. (Never mind that strip searches rarely turn up contraband and are often racially targeted; does any scenario justify institutionalised sexual violence?) When Jamie yells at the female psychologist—who seems quite easy to unnerve for someone in her profession—and the conclusion viewers draw is only “what a misogynist”, it sidelines that he’s also a prisoner. For this interpretation, blame may not lie with the shows creators, but the reviewers and commentators who have uncritically printed things like “One British police force has even said [the show] should be a ‘wake-up call for parents’.”

This last point hits upon what is arguably the primary target of Adolescence: parents who are anxious about their children’s internet use. It’s true, as the show argues, that the internet and angry fathers have a strong impact on boys’ learned misogyny. It’s less clear that the solution is for adults to monitor their children’s online activity — controlling the sites their kids visit, rather than just limiting screentime and maintaining open communication — or to “do better” as parents (whatever that means).

Given Starmer’s massive tax cuts to tech companies, ongoing school funding cuts and disavowal of teaching “gender ideology” in sex education, I doubt he truly cares about preventing online right-wing radicalisation. For his part, series co-writer Jack Thorne wants to strengthen the Online Safety Act, which among other things lets parents restrict their children from seeing “racist, antisemitic, homophobic, or misogynist” content. While this may sound reasonable on paper, in practice it provides faux-progressive cover for bigoted parents to restrict their kids from engaging online with Palestinian liberation or trans rights. The legislation effectively posits that children and their opinions belong to their parents, not the tech companies. No room is made for children to belong to themselves.

In prescribing Adolescence to schoolchildren, Starmer comes off like a square dad certain that kids will appreciate the same art as him. But while schools do help produce misogynists like Jamie, it’s a strange choice to screen a TV show in lieu of making more material changes. When Adolescence is offered to help teachers tackle misogyny and internet addiction — in place of measures like, say, decreasing classroom sizes — it overlooks that teachers have wildly different ways of teaching texts. Some teachers are misogynistic creeps in a system that puts young people at their disposal. What themes do we think they will draw from the show?

Without a teacher who questions the show’s portrayal of police and prisons, what do we think misogynist boys, Jamies in training, will take from Adolescence? That you should be nice to women — even bullies — otherwise the police, England’s women-respecters, will get you? Misogynist grifters already position themselves as brave truth tellers in a misandrist world. Teenage Andrew Tate fans could easily treat Adolescence with ridicule and intensified aggrievement, while boys like this 15-yr-old who said “I am always told that I am part of the problem but never allowed to be part of the solution” will probably feel alienated. The show has come out in a country where schools are banning physical touch between students and the Supreme Court just declared trans women legally not women. Bringing back “scared straight” pedagogy might make Starmer look tough on crime, but it won’t soften anyone’s misogyny.

Now that the discourse around Adolescence has died down, it’s hard to tell from the outside what place, if any, the show will have within the education system. Sarah Kilpatrick, the head of the National Education Union in the UK, accused the government of “abdicating responsibility to Netflix”, so it probably hasn’t gone down brilliantly. Despite the absence of genuine reform, perhaps some teachers have found Adolescence to be a useful pedagogical tool, and others not. But that’s the point. No art can be reduced to one reading that justifies calling it necessary — as if it was a pack of rations to take on a forced march — and it’s a fool’s errand to shove a TV show at teenagers in the hope they behave better.