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Yeah, I've been looking for an opportunity to jump into this, with my perspective on the show from here in the States, where it's been popular but not explosively dominating the pop-culture discourse like it seems to be across the pond. I didn't watch the whole show, but my fiancée did and I caught significant chunks of it. I thought it was a very well-made psychological thriller/crime drama. The actors were very good -- the child actor playing the son in particular, but the supporting cast were quite good too, the father in particular stands out in my memory as having some solid scenes. I'm a bit of a sucker for the one-shot long-take gimmick but I thought it was done really well and with purpose, it ratchets up the tension and makes things feel more real (perhaps a factor in why everyone seems to be taking it so damn seriously). It's not made explicit whether he actually committed the murder until, iirc, the third episode and you can really feel the confusion of the characters as they believe or don't believe the story, his parents being in denial until the end, etc. The show overall kind of feels like a plot you might see in an episode of Law and Order: SVU but given a higher production value and done in a sort of elevated indie-artsy style. It's genuinely very well done.
So, I definitely understand why the show was a hit. What I do not understand is why it has become this absurd social flashpoint. Yes, the show includes some cringey dialogue about the young killer being radicalized by "the manosphere", but the point of the show (or at least, this is how it seemed to my American eyes) is the drama, the social commentary is just there to make things topical -- like when CSI would do an episode about killers organizing in chat rooms in the 2000s -- and is very much secondary to just being an interesting piece of fiction in and of itself. I did not get the sense that it was pushing any kind of significant message at all, really. There's an element of "this could be your kid next" but only in the way that you're supposed to think "ooohh, Michael Myers could come to YOUR town!" when you watch Halloween.
What I'm getting at is this. The interesting question, in my mind, is not "why does the show exist in the form it does" or "why is it popular"; it is a somewhat-soapy crime drama involving children and families and a salacious murder, and has some elements tying in to topical hot-button issues. In short, it's top-tier mom-bait -- think again of the venerable Law and Order: SVU -- that's been elevated to wider success on the back of good execution (direction, cinematography, and acting). This kind of stuff has been successful for decades, and Adolescence is an unusually well-crafted example of the type, but nothing more -- so the interesting question, to me, is "why did the British government and mass media latch onto this so insanely hard?" They're talking about it like it's some kind of exposé and not, you know, a completely fictional TV show. Because -- to reiterate -- the show by itself does not come off as a preachy after-school special type of thing, or even especially woke. It's the same sort of salacious, loosely-based-on-the-headlines drama that people have been making for decades. When I first saw that people in the UK government wanted to show it in schools I sincerely thought it was a joke -- but now it seems like they're really going to do it. Is it just a sort of dark bread and circuses thing, "let's gin up some furor about this fictional story so we can avoid dealing with our many real problems"? If so, it looks like it's working, as both woke and anti-woke commentators are taking the whole thing incredibly seriously. Pardon my French, but, what the fuck is going on in England?
England has a very very very strong cordon sanitaire. After Brexit, everyone is aware that popular dissatisfaction can have teeth but everyone who matters is also very firmly in control of the relevant levers and is determined never to give an inch ever again. So you get this absurd drama as they try and 'solve' popular problems by lying about what they are and then 'fixing' them. Are young men angry and unhappy? Yes. Is it because of the phones? No, of course not.*
At the same time, because of the social consequences, everyone is eying each other and trying to figure out what they actually believe. I had a conversation with a childhood friend a few days ago that played out like a meeting between two 'confirmed bachelors' in the 20s. It took two hours for us to work out that we were both Brexit voters.
*At least, not that way. Constant phone usage is causing real issues b/c of lack of social contact but the manosphere to the extent it exists is boys complaining about the problems they already have.
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I haven't watched the show or plan to, but your description of the phenomenon surrounding it reminds me a bit of the Netflix show Jessica Jones from about a decade back. Not nearly as big a deal in terms of being talked about for ideological messaging as Adolescence, but I ran into more than a few mentions by people about it as some great demonstration of "rape culture." When I watched the show, it was a decent superhero dramedy that was so extremely far removed from anything approaching social reality that the notion that it was some meaningful social commentary to anyone who's not actively trying to twist it that way seemed utterly absurd.
Which, I think, points to why the people talking about these shows this way are doing so: they're actively trying to twist it that way. The mainstream ideology that these people follow posits that fictional works always and inevitably have political and ideological meaning, which is why the followers so often decrt media that has the wrong messaging and also try to create media that has the right messaging. This show Adolescence seems to have enough features that allow them to see the correct patterns that properly flatter them and their messaging, and it's apparently well made to boot, so they latch on to it.
The funniest possible thing to happen now would be the writer(s) of the show being proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be unremorseful sexual predators.
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