A family torn apart, a community rocked, and a teenage girl murdered — Stephen Graham’s Adolescence is ripped straight from the headlines.

I sat down on Thursday to watch the new mini series, which premiered on Netflix last week, and found it to be as chilling as it is familiar.

There’s no question that Jamie Miller (played by an incandescent Owen Cooper in his debut role) is guilty — after all, it is the premise of the fictional series. The question Graham and co-writer Jack Thorne are interested in is why.

What causes a young boy from a suburban working class family in middle England to stab his classmate to death with a kitchen knife?

The answer: a noxious cocktail of online misogyny, as I learn over the course of four spell-binding hours.

Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper star. (Image: Netflix, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

As a young man in my twenties, I’m not too far away from where Jamie is in Adolescence. Ten years ago, I was the angsty teenager, convinced of my unworthiness and ashamed of my failings.

Had my parents not been so vigilant (I didn’t have a smartphone until S3 or social media until I was 15), I could have very well fallen down the same trap.

Yet, the internet of 2015 is much different than it is today, especially when it comes to what teenagers have access to. Snapchat was in its infancy and Tiktok and Instagram Reels didn’t exist.

Social media platforms were primarily used for posting photos, not scrolling endlessly through videos put together by the invisible hand of the algorithm.

I remember when the #MeToo movement first........

© Herald Scotland