Minutes into the new Netflix drama “Adolescence,” a thirteen-year-old boy is arrested for murder. Early in the morning, half a dozen officers bash in the front door of a modest family home, and a black-clad policeman rushes upstairs to train a submachine gun on the young suspect, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper). When the boy stumbles out of bed, it becomes apparent that he’s wet himself in fear. For much of the pilot, it’s impossible not to wonder if the cops have it all wrong: with his doe eyes, small frame, and timid, tearful demeanor, Jamie appears incapable of serious violence. Then his internet history turns up. The investigators note the “aggressive” comments he’s left on photos of skin-baring models on Instagram. “How do you feel about women, Jamie?” asks one of the detectives. It’s too big a question to ask a child, but the answer will determine his fate.

“Adolescence” is not a whodunnit. By the end of the interrogation scene, it’s incontrovertible that Jamie killed one of his classmates, a girl named Katie. The U.K.-set limited series is essentially a “whydunnit,” told mostly from the points of view of the adults around him: his parents (Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco); a clinical psychologist (Erin Doherty); and the lead detective, Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters), who’s haunted by his own strained relationship with his teen-age son, Adam. Though we come to learn about facets of Jamie’s life through these disparate lenses, they never quite coalesce.

Each of the show’s four hour-long episodes was shot in a single take, immersing us in, say, the tense sixty minutes at the station immediately after Jamie’s arrest, or Bascombe’s discouraging visit to Jamie’s (and Adam’s) school, where the students display a callous yet believable indifference to the investigation. Though these scenes unfold in real time, the narrative as a whole progresses in fits and starts: episodes are separated by days or months, during which Jamie becomes something of a cause célèbre for the internet’s scariest men.

The standout third chapter—a two-person chamber play set in the juvenile facility where Jamie is held until his trial—makes the most of the gimmick’s claustrophobic potential. The psychologist, Briony, who’s become friendly enough with Jamie to sneak him hot cocoa as a treat, encounters unexpected resistance when she begins her evaluation. The once docile Jamie, convinced he’s being manipulated, becomes testy and volatile. Cooper, who’s remarkably understated throughout the season, finally gets to unveil his range, and Doherty is heartbreaking as a professional who hates the role she has to play in Jamie’s legal saga, even as she’s confronted with his capacity for cruelty.

This thematic through line is the show’s most distinctive feature: “Adolescence” is an expression of parental panic, an effort to grapple with the crisis of boys and tech-addled masculinity today. The small screen’s cautionary tales about youth culture skew toward girls: the high-school melodrama “Euphoria,” a horror story for adults, has a predominantly female cast, as does last year’s “Social Studies,” a docuseries in which Lauren Greenfield screen-records teens’ phones to capture what it’s like to grow up online. (Spoiler alert: not great!) These shows reflect what we now know all too well: that, for a young girl, the internet can be a confidence-wrecking—if not an actively dangerous—place. In pop culture, as in life, we seem less sure of how to addressthe particular struggles of boys, who are now faring worse than their female peers both academically and socially. The recent rightward shift among young men, who helped Donald Trump clinch the Presidency, has only intensified the urgency of the search for answers.

Unfortunately, “Adolescence” ’s flashy, fragmentary approach undermines its attempts to illuminate. Andrew Tate, incels, and the manosphere get name-checked, and the plot could easily, if crudely, be summed up by the ever-viral quote commonly attributed to Margaret Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” But I ended up wishing that the show could have given genuine interiority to its young male characters, especially those beyond Jamie. (We learn next to nothing about what even his closest friends think of the homicide, though one of them is eventually charged as an accomplice.) Because the series opts to focus more on the societal factors that make such a killing plausible than on Jamie’s specific desires and concerns, its perspective is only ever that of an outsider. And though it pays lip service to Katie’s neglected humanity, its true sympathy lies less with the victim than with the grownup bystanders trying to make sense of it all.

This generational divide looms throughout the case. When Bascombe’s son explains to him that red hearts, yellow hearts, purple hearts, and orange hearts all have different meanings among his schoolmates on Instagram—a revelation that negates the detectives’ working theory on what Katie meant to Jamie and vice versa—you can practically see the chasm widening. Wielded by teens, each emoji might as well be a hieroglyph; it’s only through the good will of a Gen Z interpreter that a breakthrough can be made. The crime gets solved, in the end, but modern boyhood remains a mystery. ♦

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