ADOLESCENCE, Netflix’s four-part single-take, real-time series about a school-boy knifing, is the streamer’s most popular series of all time in Britain and in many other parts of the world. It has been hailed by critics as a television breakthrough and endorsed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who not only watched it at home with his kids but wants it viewed in all British schools. 

There are multiple subjects which the series embraces, including: a generation reared on the internet that is media savvy and relationship ignorant; the deterioration of the public school system; and the class system as evidenced in episode three’s confrontation of its working-class adolescent who marks out the privileged or “posh” status of a police psychologist. 

But its main focus, and the lens through which all of these subjects is refracted (as is made painfully obvious in episode four) is male violence, passed on through generations and perpetrated against women.