TV shouldn't be setting the national conversation
On Adolescence, Mr Bates and the limitations of TV to set the agenda
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In my other life, I’m a professional TV critic. I write a couple of reviews a week for a British publication, The Independent, covering the best (and worst) television from these shores and abroad. It sounds semi-glamorous, getting to watch and write about new series before they’ve aired, but it’s, actually, usually conducted with the same grotty, personal methodology I employ for this Substack. In my attic office, a pot of coffee attached via IV drip, a snoring dog lying beside me.
If there’s one review that has haunted me over the past few years, it was my judgment on ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office. For my international readers, this was a dramatisation of a long-running scandal in the UK, the conviction of a number of people who had run small franchises of the Post Office for a supposed fraud that was actually a software error deployed centrally. It’s a shocking tale and their long fight for justice has shamed many of Britain’s important institutions. But by the time ITV’s version came to screens in January 2024, the story had been prodigiously covered in UK news publications. I found the attempt to jazz it up into a four-parter quite needless. “It is hard to imagine many will stick with Mr Bates vs the Post Office for the full duration of its four-night run,” I wrote, during my three-star review of the show.
The punchline here, of course, is that the show went on to be a hugely impactful conversation-setter about the plight of the subpostmasters, that ultimately resulted in changes to the law, their total exoneration and a vast compensation package. If the show were being made now, it’d have to be called Sir Alan vs the Post Office, as the title character has since been knighted. The whole thing was an enormous success. At the Broadcasting Press Guild awards last year, one of my podcasts had won Podcast of the Year and so we had a couple of tables at the glitzy central London luncheon. But all eyes were on the Mr Bates table, complete with stars Toby Jones and Monica Dolan, where the show had picked up the big jury prize. I avoided speaking to anyone from that table, in case they recognised me as the one critic who seemed to have a deflating take on their baby.
Mr Bates vs the Post Office was a surprise hit for ITV, the least glamorous of the UK’s terrestrial broadcasters. It secured huge audiences, bags of awards, and a change in the national conversation. It has proved, in the year and a bit since its release, an attractive prototype for broadcasters. I have seen numerous projects – both in development and being distributed – being compared to the show. “This under-reported scandal,” they always seem to say, “is the next Mr Bates.” The next show that boils the piss of audiences at home, the next show that scoops an endless series of gongs (Mr Bates somehow also won two awards at the 2025 edition of the BPG awards too), the next show that is held up as “important”, a justification for the future of linear TV.
In the past month, I’ve reviewed two shows written by a British writer called Jack Thorne, whose past credits include the His Dark Materials adaptation and co-writing the Harry Potter stage show. Those shows were Toxic Town, a dramatisation of the fight for justice of a group of mothers whose children had been left seriously impaired by toxic dust from an old steelworks, and Adolescence. Both could reasonably have been pitched as “the next Mr Bates”. The first of these is a classic “dupe” of ITV’s formula. Find an open-wound scandal which has been resolved enough for dramatisation but where there’s still a demonstrable lack of accountability, and bring it to the masses. The show – which stars former-Doctor Jodie Whittaker and The White Lotus’s Aimee Lou Wood – is pretty decent. Like Mr Bates (in my opinion and my opinion only, below the line commenters) it’s a little too straight-laced, a little too earnest to ever be particularly interesting. But it’s a terrible injustice (possibly an order of magnitude more serious that that perpetrated against the subpostmasters) and is well-made.
Yet it didn’t really seem to touch the sides of the national conversation. Why was that? Could it be that the Corby poisonings are too well-known? That hardly seems likely, given that the British press has not been especially good at showing an interest in anything that happens in a Northern steel-town. Could it be that the jeopardy of the drama felt too resolved? Well, as the series’ end credits point out, there are still many ex-landfill sites that could be creating airborne toxins, not to mention the fact that no-one has faced criminal charges for the, transparently criminal, activities that went on in Corby (indeed, the show has to create composite characters within the council to avoid potential defamation, perhaps giving the show a less effective villain than the Post Office’s Paula Vennells). Could it be because it was broadcast on Netflix, rather than on one of the terrestrial channels? That, above all others, seemed a very plausible answer (27.3m UK households have access to ITV; 17.1m have access to Netflix). That was, I should say, until the release of Adolescence.
Adolescence is being widely heralded as the new Mr Bates. Like it’s tonal sibling, it’s a four-part series, though, unlike that award-winner, it’s on Netflix. The series is composed of four distinct episodes following the investigation of a terrible crime at crucial junctures: the arrest of a suspect, investigations at the suspect’s school, psychological evaluation of the suspect, and the family finding out that the the suspect will plead guilty. Each episode unfolds over the course of a single, 50-minute shot, a rarely (but far from never) deployed filmmaking technique that can be read as virtuosic or gimmicky depending on your preferences (I lean, marginally, towards the latter). More important than its technical complexity is its subject matter: the perpetrator of violence in Adolescence is a 13-year-old boy, radicalised on the digital manosphere by creators like Andrew Tate (who is specifically name-checked in the show).
The series has been a terrific success for Netflix. 6.5m UK viewers tuned into the first episode in its first week of broadcast, comfortably beating out its linear TV competitors (which is still a rare accomplishment for streaming). And because everyone’s been watching it, everyone’s been talking about it too (which used to be a given, in the age of linear TV, but which has become increasingly rare in our atomised streaming world). Talk has revolved around the portrayal of male adolescence and the distressing views that Gen Z are evolving on the subject of violence against women. Adolescence’s co-creator Thorne used an interview with the BBC to advocate for a ban on social media for minors, and legislation to inhibit the use of mobile phones in schools. This suggestion has been accompanied by a flurry of think pieces about the state of masculinity, our reliance on technology, and a counter-cycle about the impossibility of returning the genie to his bottle cage. What’s clear, through the murk of differing opinions, is that Adolescence is the first post-Bates show to achieve, and justify, the label of “the new Mr Bates”. Indeed, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer used a question at his weekly PMQs session to suggest that the series should be show, both on the parliamentary estate and in schools, in order to inform and educate on the subject of male alienation and incipient violence.
Starmer’s response is a populist one, in its truest sense. The British people have rallied behind a cultural artefact – something they very rarely do. This has brought the salience of the issue way up the governing Labour party’s agenda (just as Mr Bates did, in the dying days of Rishi Sunak’s doomed administration last year). This is a delicate thing. Is this a genuinely addressable and urgent policy area? Or an optics-based response to a very contemporary preoccupation? This week, Thorne joined the Prime Minister, and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, at Downing Street to discuss the issues raised by the show. “To be honest, as a dad, I have not found it easy viewing," the Prime Minister told reporters. But is this genuinely something the government feel they need to be tackling? Or an easy opportunity for a photo-call and some good press?
This is a strange role for television to be playing. Television has long had a role in our national conversations, breaking taboos (such as gay kisses in soap operas) or normalising things like mixed-race relationships or inclusivity for the trans community. What’s more new is this sense of television as a campaigning tool. It is a role that is being leveraged both by creators, who see it as a perpetual motion machine for positive publicity, and politicians, who see it as a simple temperature test for the mood of the country. At the 2019 General Election, no politician was talking about compensation for the subpostmasters as a vote-shifter, and so when that ball came into play in January 2025, it was an easy, almost apolitical, thing to grapple with. Similarly, we had a General Election last year(!), in which the issues of children and social media, and young boys’ views on violence against women, got barely any airing. There were two fleeting references in the 2024 Labour manifesto to the issue (a promise that schools would “address misogyny and teach young people about healthy relationships and consent”, something they should, surely, have already been doing, as well as a commitment to push through the Online Safety Act). But it wasn’t something that was coming up on the doorstep or addressed in stump speeches. But the ball has broken loose from the scrum, and Keir Starmer seems to be running with it.
I have a few reservations about this. First and foremost, Adolescence is not Mr Bates vs the Post Office. It is a work of fiction, and one that simplifies a lot of the complexities of these crimes for the sake of easy digestion. Being influenced by “similar” crimes is not the same as being a true story, and I worry about any policy agenda that seems to be based on the revelations of a piece of dramatic storytelling. I would be equally uncomfortable if Keir Starmer invited Mike White to Parliament in order to discuss the plight of “fraternal handjobs”, as depicted in the most recent series of The White Lotus.
The creators of Adolescence are not authorities on the subjects of misogyny, violent crime or technology. Thorne has been mixing his responsibilities here with writing the next TRON film; his co-writer, actor Stephen Graham, just appeared in the final film in the Venom trilogy. They are entertainers, not policy wonks. Their depiction of poisonous ideologies spreading to children via social media has had a profound impact in raising the importance of this topic, but it also obfuscates a decade of sensitive research and consideration about this subject area. I feel it would be a mistake to take Adolescence too literally, to not appreciate the difference between fact and fiction, and to not defer, then, to people who understand the nuanced relationship between social media and the perpetrators of acts of violence.
TV is an imperfect setter of the national conversation. Good TV – propelled by a sense of political exigency – has to be shocking. When uninitiated viewers watched Mr Bates vs the Post Office, they were shocked by the injustice that had been perpetrated against good, hardworking people who had their characters defamed, their livelihoods destroyed, and, in some cases, their freedom taken from them. When some viewers came to Adolescence they had the same experience of shock. They were presented with a snout-to-tail portrait of the festering resentment of young men, the sense of violent ownership they felt over their female contemporaries’ bodily autonomy. And yet, what I said in my original review of Mr Bates is still true. Many great journalists, like Nick Wallis, had written about the subpostmasters scandal, and many great news TV shows, like Panorama, had covered it in great depth. Computer Weekly and Private Eye had been covering it for over a decade. BBC Radio 4 had just produced a podcast series, The Great Post Office Trial, about it. And so the people who were shocked by the show were, in fact, those people who were most news avoidant, least engaged, beforehand.
To have your perspective changed by Adolescence, you have to be quite tuned out of the toxic atmosphere of elements of the web. Certainly, if you have school-age children then there’s nothing in the show that should come as a surprise. Phrases like “toxic masculinity”, “incel” and “alt-right” ought to be in regular rotation for anyone regularly interacting with Gen Z boys. Andrew Tate is, rightly, notorious – parents should be as wary of his doctrine as they would be of a radical religious sect. And so the shock element comes from the ostriches, the people whose heads have been buried in the sand. If you don’t engage with the news – with the injustices of our little world – unless it’s packaged up in a four-part drama on Netflix with your favourite actor (“he was brilliant in Pirates of the Caribbean!”) then your only exposure to these issues will be through the prism of fiction. And that’s a dangerous way to set the agenda, because it is far harder to make a shocking, gripping drama about, say, climate change or immigration than it is about ‘nice Mr Bates’ being ripped off, or about the brutal murder of a young schoolgirl. The biggest issues facing society today can’t be neatly packaged up on ITV or Netflix, and so they get excluded from the discourse. The see-saw tilts from broadsheet to tabloid: we focus on stories rendered in big colours, with morally manageable angles and easy (sounding) solutions.
I remember back in 2012, when I was at university. Possibly I was halfway through Middlemarch and thus looking for distraction, when I heard chatter on social media about a video called Kony 2012. The 30-minute film told the story of Joseph Kony, a Ugandan warlord who was wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. The video, produced by an American organisation called Invisible Children, was intended to direct the eyes of Western audiences towards the horrors of what was happening in central Africa, a region rarely covered in the news. I, like so many viewers, was appalled by the story, and by my own ignorance of it. In the US and UK, we had focused so obsessively on the Middle East, the war on terror, and issues directly impacting our borders, that we seemed to have missed the most egregious human rights violation of our lifetimes. The video was an instant hit, amassing millions of views on YouTube (at a time when viral videos were just becoming a thing), encouraging hundreds of celebrity calls for action, and receiving an official response from the White House. "We congratulate the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have mobilized to this unique crisis of conscience,” the President’s Press Secretary wrote.
And yet, here we are, in 2025, and nobody is talking about Joseph Kony. Indeed, Kony is still at large, rumoured to be hiding in Darfur, but there is little international attention on that. Indeed, there’s little international attention, still, on anything that happens in Africa. The director of Kony 2012, Jason Russell, had a brief psychotic incident in the wake of the video’s release, in which he was filmed running naked around San Diego, and has faded from the public eye in the decade since. Invisible Children is now widely regarded as being symptomatic of so-called “slacktivism”, a pejorative term levelled at campaigns, often sparked on social media, that provide easy moral gratification but little by way of real action. More often than not, Kony is, these days, the punchline to a joke about brief collective hysteria generated by social media. The cycle is a simple one: we hadn’t heard of Kony, we were shocked by Kony, we forgot about Kony.
This sense that TV is the tail wagging the dog of our national conversation reminds me a little of Kony 2012. I cared – briefly – about Joseph Kony because I had the scales lifted from my eyes. I wouldn’t have been shocked enough to watch or share that video if I had already known about Kony. If I had understood the situation in that region after the Ugandan Civil War, I would have been far less likely to engage with this campaign. But the vapidity of Kony 2012 – its failure to achieve any real change beyond fostering a new form of indolent digital colonialism – should serve as a warning about letting the agenda be set by the ignorant, rather than the informed. TV is a world of plot twists and cliff hangers, and resolutions that wrap things up neatly for the audience, while the real world is the opposite. The real world usually just continues on its inexorable way – never ending, never beginning – just spinning along in a manner that is both largely predictable and entirely unstoppable. We must, therefore, dare to call TV what it is: an engaging, but fundamentally limited, entertainment product.