The Adolescence Autopsy: Struggle Without Structure – Adolescence and the Politics of Evasion
3 min read
Adolescence presents a chaotic, failing school system shaped by austerity and neglect but avoids naming the systemic forces behind it. Working-class parents are portrayed as noble yet powerless, with their hardship stripped of political context. The show personalises blame while ignoring institutional accountability, offering struggle without critique. It romanticises youth and love without examining the conditions that sustain or erode them. By refusing to identify who benefits from the disorder, it aestheticises suffering instead of challenging it – reducing structural harm to passive observation.
If the school in Adolescence is meant to represent the average British comprehensive, then it’s a damning indictment. The classroom is in chaos. The teachers are overwhelmed. There’s tension, disengagement, too many students, and not enough support. It’s a textbook case of a failing institution.
But though the show gestures at a broken system, it simultaneously backs away – like it’s scared to name the real culprits. There’s no mention of austerity. No commentary on funding cuts, exclusion rates, or the fact that schools are expected to operate as both educators and social services – without the pay, power, or capacity to do either. We don’t even get a throwaway line about overworked teachers or zero-tolerance policies. Instead, we’re left to fill in the blanks – not emotionally, but politically.
Adolescence wants to feel radical without ever naming anything radical. It hints at class but refuses to critique capitalism. It shows us struggle, but not structure. It says, “look how hard life is,” without asking: who made it that way?
Take the parents. The father literally has a shit job – working 12-hour night shifts, fixing toilets. The mother is exhausted, emotionally overstretched, and always on edge, yet we see none of her paid or unpaid labour. They’re working class, but it’s bathed in soft lighting and noble sacrifice. They’re struggling, but quietly so. Stoically so.
The dad expresses controlled anger – fully unleashing it on inanimate objects instead of people, trying his best to be better than his own father. The mum absorbs the stress like carpet soaking up a spill – compliant, appeasing. It’s giving “good poor” – respectable, quiet, grateful. Not angry poor calling out injustice, exploitation, or any unnatural suffering. And it’s certainly not organising poor. Reduced to exhaustion and stripped of agency, they’re presented as impotent, and take no action other than acceptance. And while the show wants us to empathise with their strain, it avoids examining the system that creates it.
When media depicts working-class struggle without political context, it reinforces the idea that hardship is just part of life – something to endure, not something that is done to you. The parents alone are made accountable – genetically, biologically, emotionally. Not the boy. Not the school. Not the government. Not the algorithms. Online radicalisation is reduced to a shrug. “He was in his room. On the computer”. That’s the whole explanation. There’s no interrogation of what he was consuming, who he was following, what platforms enabled it, or how inequality creates fertile ground for harmful ideologies to grow.
Adolescence wants credit for tackling big issues without ever getting its hands dirty. But you can’t critique a system you refuse to name. And you can’t claim to show truth if you won’t show power. If you’re going to show struggle, show the system behind it. If you’re going to show chaos, show who benefits from the disorder. If you’re going to depict working-class pain, don’t sentimentalise it – contextualise it. Because otherwise, all you are doing is aestheticising injustice. And that’s not radical. It’s just passive.
Even the presentation of his parents’ teenage love story feels like a distraction. They meet at 13, hold hands, kiss, and stay together forever – an effortless fairytale, Disney-style. But there’s no attempt to ask what made that possible – what privileges, personalities, or policies created and sustained it. It’s simply portrayed as something lost, with the tragedy being that the boy didn’t get the same story. The show gives us the idyllic, with no infrastructure, and weaponised nostalgia, with no analysis. There’s no critique of the conditions, the stability, the social protections, or the broader social environment that no longer exists. And there are no warnings about the false expectations that this romanticised image of (teenage) love produces.
So yes, the schools are broken, the parents are broken, romance is dead, and a child could do with fixing. But the destruction did not occur by accident. And unless you say what ruined them – and who profits from that ruin – don’t expect applause for just standing there pointing at the rubble.
