MAGA is trying to make hit Netflix series Adolescence a flashpoint for a conversation about immigration, when that’s not what the show’s creators intended.
The new limited drama series is about a young British boy accused of murdering a classmate. One of the writers, Jack Thorne, told BBC Radio 2 in the U.K. that the show is about “male anger, male rage.” The show has sparked a national conversation in the U.K. about male violence, and was even mentioned in British parliament.
Thorne wrote the four-parter alongside acclaimed actor Stephen Graham, who—in an interview with GQ—also said it is inspired by male on female violence, itself spearheaded by “radicalization online.” Graham added in that interview that self-described misogynist Andrew Tate had an impact on the storyline.
But both MAGA, and the British right wing aren’t buying it. Some in those circles are decrying the fact that the main character is played by a white actor and claiming that the production is based on the story of Hassan Sentamu, a Black man who last week was jailed for life for the murder of a 15-year-old girl when he was 17, in September 2023.
“This is how Netflix portrays a 13-year-old knife murderer in the UK. Second image is the person it was based on,” Irish “Far-Right Ideologue” Keith Woods—who has been retweeted by Elon Musk—wrote on X.
He shared an image of the main character Jamie Miller, played by white actor Owen Cooper, alongside an image of the aforementioned Sentamu, now 18, falsely claiming his killing of Elianne Andam was the sole inspiration for Adolescence.
The fact that Sentamu was born in Uganda is a bone of contention with the British far right. He moved to London when he was about 3 years old.
The Standard reported that the killer confessed to a friend “the real me is evil, dark and miserable” weeks before killing Elianne, who had been standing up for her friend in an argument over a stuffed toy when she was attacked.
Others tried to insinuate that choosing a white actor to play the main role in Adolescence is evidence of obfuscating a problem with violent crimes perpetrated by immigrants. “Race-switching a murderer in your show to change the topic from immigration to toxic masculinity is so deeply evil and dishonest I have trouble properly expressing my rage,” one critic, who appears to be American, wrote.
Patrick Christys, a presenter on ultra-conservative U.K. TV network GB News, said the show “unfairly demonizes white working-class boys.”
Darren Grimes, a right-wing cheerleader akin to Joey Mannarino in the U.S., said the show is “anti-male propaganda.”
He suggested the writers made “up fictional white villains.”
Grimes, too, said the show is inspired by Sentamu’s killing of his young victim. “In Netflix’s ‘reimagined’ universe, the attacker magically becomes white. It’s almost as if reality doesn’t fit neatly into their comfortable narrative. Radicalized white bloke? Now that’s box office gold for the avocado-toast classes,” he wrote on his website, caveating his message with an “obligatory disclaimer” that “violence against women is vile, evil, abhorrent—you name it."
Critics largely argue recent instances of knife crime in the U.K. have been perpetrated by men with immigrant backgrounds like Sentamu and Axel Rudakubana, the 18-year-old jailed for life for the killing of three young girls in Southport in July 2024.
One X critic even said the quiet bit out loud, writing: “This is how they brainwash us into believing white men are the problem, when in fact, it’s immigrants.”
This argument ignores white misogynistic killers like Kyle Clifford, who was just jailed for murdering three women in England in July last year.
Male on female domestic abuse has even been declared a national emergency in England and Wales. The argument also serves to dilute the actual message of the show: male violence, and the rising tide of misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate.
“We had to, in order to understand this problem, in order to look at male anger, male rage, we sort of had to understand our own anger and our own rage, and our own problems and our own cruelty, and the ways that we have been less than perfect,” co-writer Thorne said in the aforementioned BBC Radio interview.
He said that the series was loosely inspired by real events, but not by one in particular. “I read an article in the paper about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl, and then a few months later on the news, there was a piece, and it was, again, it was a young boy who had stabbed a young girl, and they were opposite ends of the country,” he explained.
“When I watched the news article, it really hurt my heart, not just as a father and as a parent, but I kind of just wondered what was going on with society, where this kind of thing is something that’s happening quite regularly.”
Graham too referenced these stories, but differentiated them from classic gang-inspired knife crime and queried the source of the hatred to cause such attacks.
“For me, there was a spate up and down the country of young boys who had stabbed young girls... there’s something in our society that we need to address and look at. But for me, the other thing was, What’s really going on here now, when young boys are stabbing young girls to death?” he said.
Of Tate, Graham added that he wasn’t fully aware of the misogynist influencer before writing Adolescence but became horrified as the Instagram algorithm served Graham more and more from the former kickboxer charged with rape and human trafficking. “In today’s day and age, these phones are very dangerous. And these so-called influencers, I think there’s a huge responsibility there,” he said.
Graham added: “Jack came up with the whole incel stuff. I said, ‘Look, I know about the radicalization online, but I don’t get it, I don’t understand it.' And Jack did all his research for that.”
In a Netflix press pack he is quoted as saying: “One of our aims was to ask, ‘What is happening to our young men these days, and what are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet and from social media?’”
Netflix confirmed to the Daily Beast that although Adolescence is inspired by the devastating knife crimes in the U.K., the series is fictional and is not based on a singular case.
