Questão de Língua Portuguesa

Adolescence Review — The closest thing to TV perfection in decades

Ben Blackall/Netflix The four-part series Adolescence, a drama about a teen accused of murder, is astonishing. Its brilliant performances, and the devastating questions it asks, will linger with you. It begins with the police bursting into 14-year-old Jamie Miller’s family home and arresting him on suspicion of murdering his classmate Katie the night before. The first two episodes immerse us in the world of the police station, and the detectives’ building of the case against Jamie, although he denies involvement. He chooses his dad, Eddie, as his appropriate adult. We will watch this man’s disbelief turn over the course of the story into immeasurable sorrow. It is no spoiler to say that Jamie killed Katie — the evidence is given to us early and incontrovertibly. The drama’s concern is with why. We are led into a teenage world that is lived primarily online and which adults are, whatever they might think, incapable of properly monitoring or understanding. Detective Luke only really begins to understand the possible “why” when his own teenage son translates the emojis used in Katie’s comments under some of Jamie’s Instagram posts. The world of “incel” culture — the message spread between boys and young men about what they are entitled to expect and to take from girls and women — comes alive. If the final episode, which concentrates on the family’s desperate attempts to hold themselves together, feels slightly weaker, it is only in the context of what has gone before. Its refusal to offer easy solutions (no abusive parents, no dark family secrets), no clear explanation as to what leads one boy to murder and others not, feels brave and real. Adolescence asks who and what we are teaching boys and how we expect them to navigate this increasingly toxic and impossible world when our concept of masculinity still seems to depend on boys and men doing so alone. And it keeps the victim present enough that the question of how many girls and women will die while we try to work it all out stays with us, too. (Lucy Mangan. www.theguardian.com, 13.03.2025. Adaptado.)