Is ‘Adolescence’ Based on a True Story? The Cases That Inspired the Netflix Hit Series, Explained

Spoiler Alert: Spoilers follow for AdolescenceLess than three months into the year, we may have already seen the best TV series of 2025. This weekend saw Netflix release Adolescence, a four-episode miniseries created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham. The show depicts a family’s worst nightmare when 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested as the lead suspect in the murder of a classmate. Viewers are given an unflinching look at the impact left on Jamie’s family, his therapist, and his own life.

It’s also one of the most stylistically audacious shows in years. Every episode is shot as a single take, and unlike films like Birdman and 1917, which stitched multiple shots together through hidden cuts, the ones here were all shot and staged for real. Yet even more impressive is that it never feels like a gimmick; it instead traps us with Jamie and his family in the never-ending hell they’re living in, with no escape to be found. The show is also one of the most potent explorations of male rage in the social media era, and Thorne and Graham were inspired by real-life events.

Was ‘Adolescence’ Inspired by True Events?

Adolescence wasn’t explicitly written about a specific real-life figure or tragedy, but true events still informed the story. In an interview with Netflix’s Tudum, co-creator and star Stephen Graham (he portrays Jamie’s father), detailed how he was inspired to write the series by a disturbing trend he had been hearing about on the news.

“There was an incident where a young boy [allegedly] stabbed a girl. It shocked me,” he explained. “I was thinking, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?’ And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again. I really just wanted to shine a light on it, and ask, ‘Why is this happening today? What’s going on? How have we come to this?’”

Indeed, when watching the show, it’s almost impossible not to be reminded of recent stabbing incidents around the world. Some of the most notable culprits include 19-year-old Axel Rudakubana, who killed three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed party in Liverpool in 2023, and a high school boy in South Korea who stabbed his female classmate in 2024 before jumping out the window. While Graham has never mentioned any of these specific incidents, the similarities they share with the events of Adolescence are hard to ignore.

Additionally, Graham’s collaborator Jack Thorne took influence from the Gitta Sereny nonfiction novel Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill, which told the true story of Mary Bell, an 11-year-old girl convicted of murder in 1968. He told Netflix, “Telling a drama that’s a why-done-it, rather than a whodunit, hopefully engages people in different questions… Phil, Stephen, and I are looking at masculinity — thinking about ourselves as men, the kinds of fathers, partners, and friends we are, and questioning with some intensity who we are as people.”

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How Did Incel Culture Inspire ‘Adolescence’?

Toxic masculinity proved to be the show’s other key influence, as Thorne wanted to explore male rage and toxic masculinity in the modern era, and especially how the rise of social media has informed it. “That is a journey I’ve never gone on as a writer before, and it scared me and excited me because it felt like we had something to say,” he explained. Indeed, the show refuses to shy away from the misogynistic online activity that shapes Jamie’s daily life, namely the fact that murder victim Katie Leonard might have been cyber-bullying him with help from his classmates.

Thus, it’s only fitting that incel culture proves a greater interest to Adolescence than the mystery, as the end of the harrowing first episode confirms that, yes, Jamie did kill Katie. The remaining three installments are then able to expand their scope and explore Jamie’s familial relationships, social life, and school environment. In particular, the second episode sees the police investigating Jamie’s school and getting a first-hand account of the unruly environment, lack of guidance from proper authority figures, and isolation that shaped much of his daily life.

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Investigator Bascombe (Ashley Walters), unfamiliar with a world defined by peer pressure and social media, only learns about the idea of the incel because of his son Adam, also a student at Jamie’s school. For all Bascombe once knew, young teenagers didn’t even have to think about sexual competition or jealousy, and thus his son’s revelations completely shake his worldview and make him question whether Jamie was a monster born from his environment.

But it’s maybe Adolescence’s greatest strength that it refuses to give a concrete motive to Jamie or to demonize anyone who helped shape him into a murderer. In particular, Jamie’s parents are portrayed very sympathetically and are horrified upon realizing they may not have ever truly known their own son. Thorne elaborated in an interview with Dextero: “One of our main aims is that beautiful saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’ We didn’t want to point the blame at anyone specifically or in particular. We wanted to say we’re all accountable in many ways for this kind of thing, be that parents, teachers, government, society, community.”

On this count, they succeeded wildly, and it’s a testament to the strength of Adolescence that, while it may not have specifically been based on a true story, it’s believable enough that it might as well have been.

You can view the original article HERE.