We All Know a Jamie Miller. That’s the Point.
By Pooja Kumari
Picture this: it’s a Tuesday night, you’ve got a deadline tomorrow, and somehow you’ve ended up three episodes deep into a Netflix show you told yourself you’d “just try.” You can’t move. You can’t look away. By the time it ends, you’re not sure if you want to cry, call your mum, or just sit in silence staring at the ceiling.
That was Adolescence. And apparently, the rest of the world felt exactly the same way.
The show has already swept up Golden Globes and Emmys across the Atlantic, and last week it dominated the 2026 BAFTA TV nominations with 11 nods — Best Limited Drama, Best Actor for Stephen Graham, and four supporting nominations for the cast. Owen Cooper, who plays the 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of his female classmate, made history at the Emmys as the youngest-ever acting award recipient, at just 15 years old. Fifteen. Let that sink in.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. The show isn’t really about one boy. It’s about every school you’ve ever been to. Every group chat. Every comment section. Every boy who got quietly radicalised between Year 8 and Year 10 and nobody noticed until it was too late.
“A Netflix drama. On the national curriculum. When did that last happen?”
Within weeks of launch, co-creator Jack Thorne was discussing its impact at the Prime Minister’s residence, and Adolescence became part of the national curriculum. A Netflix drama. On the national curriculum. When did that last happen? The answer is: never. Because nothing has ever hit quite like this.
Which brings me to Louis Theroux, because the timing of his new documentary is not a coincidence. Released on Netflix on 11 March, ‘Inside the Manosphere’ has already been described as “a necessary companion piece to Adolescence” [1]; and honestly? That’s exactly what it is. Where Adolescence shows you the tragedy in four gut-wrenching episodes, Theroux shows you the conveyor belt producing it.
He sits across from influencers who tell millions of teenage boys that women are lesser, that weakness is shameful, that the world is against them, and he just… lets them talk. The hypocrisy unravels almost immediately: men who preach dominance and control crumble the second the women in their lives walk into the room. It’s almost funny. Except it isn’t, because these are the men our younger brothers are watching instead of doing their homework.
Theroux puts it plainly: as a parent to three boys, “they spend many more hours on their phones than they do with us, and we don’t always know what they’re looking at.” [2] And if that doesn’t make your stomach drop, you haven’t been paying attention.
We are the generation that grew up with this stuff in our peripheral vision, the Andrew Tate clips on someone’s phone at lunch, the incel terminology creeping into casual conversation, the boys who got weird online and everyone just shrugged. Adolescence gave that a face. Theroux’s documentary gave it a business model.
Eleven BAFTA nominations is a number. What these two shows are doing together is something bigger — they’re making it impossible to look away from a problem that’s been hiding in plain sight.
[1] Emma Cieslik, “Netflix Documentary ‘Inside the Manosphere’ Exposes a Digital Pipeline to Misogyny,” Ms. Magazine, March 22, 2026, https://msmagazine.com/2026/03/22/inside-the-manosphere-social-media-louis-theroux/.
[2] Tudum Staff, “Louis Theroux Goes Inside the Manosphere in His Latest Documentary,” Netflix Tudum, March 11, 2026, https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/louis-theroux-inside-the-manosphere-release-date-news.
