The Adolescence Autopsy: Adolescence, Doubt, and the Privilege of Ambiguity
4 min read
Adolescence (2025) and Doubt (2008) use ambiguity not as neutrality but as a shield from accountability. With no clear narrative, no crime shown, and no hard evidence, both shows rely on vagueness to blur responsibility. In Doubt, this uncertainty is deliberate – a moral tension – while in Adolescence, it unintentionally exposes systemic bias: white, male youth are presumed innocent regardless of circumstance. These portrayals reveal how ambiguity often protects perpetrators and obscures truth, reinforcing society’s resistance to holding certain identities accountable.
Watching Adolescence on Netflix felt like a reimagining of the play and 2008 film Doubt (which I happened to also see that weekend). But instead of a nun and a priest circling suspicion within the context of the Catholic Church, we get a teenage white boy, a dead girl, and a world of ambiguity designed to protect him.
Both shows lean hard on uncertainty. Was it him? Was it not? Is he guilty – or just misunderstood? Even when the suspect says he’ll plead guilty or resign, it’s not framed as a confession – just a move in the game. A strategy. Not an acknowledgment of harm.
We don’t see either of them commit anything. No crime. No victim aftermath. There are no flashbacks. No testimonies. No social media posts. No incel tirades. Like Father Flynn’s “usually long nails,” the closest thing we get to a red flag in Adolescence is the vaguely ominous: “he was in his room on the computer”. Great. So are most people. What are we meant to take from that?
Neither show offers a clear narrative because neither wants one. Ambiguity is the entire aesthetic. But this ambiguity isn’t neutral – it’s protective. It wraps itself around the suspect like a weighted blanket. In Doubt, this is intentional and purposeful – it’s the whole point of the show. But in Adolescence, this is unintentionally revealing.
In Adolescence, the suspect has no vulnerabilities other than his age – and somehow, that’s enough. The boy is white, soft-spoken, intelligent – we’re told this at least three times per episode, just in case we forget – as if it is a marker of goodness, with his quietness treated as a symbol of “depth”. His family might have its issues, but is portrayed as “loving” (especially compared to the others mentioned). And everyone – from police to psychologist to parent – dances around him like he’s made of glass. Privilege sits on him like armour. There’s no urgency to prosecute. No pressure to condemn.
Contrast that with how Black and brown children are treated in the same systems. Doubt doesn’t protect them. Doubt doesn’t delay judgment. Doubt isn’t even allowed. Even actual innocence doesn’t save them. If this protagonist were marginalised in any way, the plot would collapse into a sentence. No nuance. No grey areas. Just criminality.
The Black boys in the show are Tommy, who’s immediately warned by his father not to talk to the police (because they know better), and Adam, who is actually being bullied and navigating an absent, unsure father – yet he doesn’t pick up a knife and kill someone. But none of their pain, context, or choices matter. What matters are the white boys. Their confusion. Their silence. Their possible redemption. The murder weapon – possessed by these white boys – is brushed aside. The knife vanishes, and the original owner, once identified, disappears from the narrative entirely without mention of any consequences. If he were Black, it would have been a very different story.
Instead, it’s just another thread lost in the fog of plausible deniability. Just as the CCTV is blurry. The shoes don’t match. And the clothes aren’t found. The show practically begs us not to be certain – unlike Doubt, which pleads for some kind of certainty, even if it’s instinctive, intuitive, emotional, spiritual. The entire narrative of both is held together by implication rather than evidence. And ambiguity functions as a shield and space for empathy, context, and care. But what Adolescence ultimately reveals is this: if you are white and male, the world will go to extraordinary lengths not to call you a killer. Even when a girl is dead. Even when you plead guilty. Even when everything points to you.
For Black and brown boys, ambiguity disappears the moment they are seen. The media calls them men. The public calls them monsters. The courts call them guilty.
Watching Adolescence and Doubt is like watching a smoke machine go off in slow motion. Atmospheric. Heavy. Nebulous. Directionless. You keep waiting for the smoke to clear – but it never does. Because the smoke is the point. But with Adolescence, what is clear is that the show isn’t about what happened. It’s about how far we’ll go to protect certain people from having to say it.
