Warning: This column discusses plot elements of “Adolescence,” including its ending scene.

I asked parents of teenagers for their reaction to the new Netflix global phenomenon “Adolescence,” and I can sum up their response in a single sentence:

It scared the hell out of them.

“It was devastating for me as a parent,” said GerRee Hinshaw, mother of a just–turned 13-year-old boy in Wheat Ridge.

“It’s so brutally devastating to watch — and it’s brilliant,” said Michael Morgan, father of a 17-year-old boy in Denver.

“I felt distress and empathy for the parents,” said the mother of a trans 13-year-old in Denver.

For the past year, Hinshaw’s family of three has been laser-focused on the aftercare of a successful kidney transplant for her husband, Lee Anderson. “With all the ensuing things that have come up,” she said, “you can just see how it wouldn’t take long for a kid to get lost in growing up in this very complicated digital landscape.”

“Adolescence,” released March 13 and already played more than 100 million times, is a four-hour drama that tells the harrowing story of a 13-year-old British boy who is charged with the murder of his classmate — a girl who has callously rejected his clumsy, prepubescent affections and mocked him for it online.

To think: When I was so nervous to ask Greta Gerwig (different name, same initials) to go steady with me in the seventh grade, instead of presenting her with the drug-store ring with the cursive G that I had bought for her, I sort of threw it at her from 5 feet away. She walked away, leaving the ring behind in the gutter. (Her friends laughed. Eventually, I did, too). But instead of taking his lumps, licking his wounds and eventually moving on, like I did, young Jamie Miller, the police claimed, responded to his rejection by pulling out a knife in humiliated, angry retaliation.

As is so often the case these days, what I recall as a “Wonder Years”-like memory for me might escalate instead into a scarring horror story for today’s “Adolescence” generation.

It is an astonishing piece of television, and not only because it is told in four remarkable episodes, each miraculously recorded in one single, meticulously planned take.

What appears at first to be a rather outlandish, popcorn-munching murder procedural soon reveals itself to be an unflinching exploration of all-too-real youth violence and the cancerous influence of misanthropic online subcultures on teenage boys. Specifically, The Red Pill, a particularly vile 10-year-old online Reddit manosphere that exists for the stated purpose, as it self-describes, “of discussing sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.” Put another way: It’s a gathering place for insecure post-#MeToo dudes to fester in the misguided, misogynist belief that women run the world, and that their male victims are not allowed to complain about it.

These men are called “incels,” which the Anti-Defamation League defines as “heterosexual men who blame women and society for their lack of romantic success.” They have based their movement largely on a respected economics theory that they have transmuted into their own belief that 80% of women are attracted to just 20% of men — the most handsome and masculine. This sense of inadequacy — the self-condemning belief that he will never be among the 20% — helps to propel Jamie into a violent spiral.

The irony, said the Denver trans parent mentioned at the top, is that women have been bombarded by a reverse-gendered version of the 80-20 rule for their entire lives.

“For centuries, we have developed this societal picture of what an attractive woman is, and now that is happening to boys,” she said. “Essentially, what that means is that boys are being trained to be the 20% — when they’re not, and it’s (bleeping) up their heads in ways that I feel like women have been battling forever.”

But because of the ingrained gender messages we instill into all children from birth, young men are far more likely than women to respond to humiliation and bullying with violence.

Some say that, at best, the Red Pill is simply a place for frustrated guys to gather and vent. At worst, it is perpetuating a culture of hatred. But it has developed followers in the millions. And their bile is being seen by impressionable (real-life) boys.

“The monster our kids are facing under the influence of social media is loss of perspective,” the parent went on to say. “They get caught up in the game of comparison and view themselves as ‘less than’: Less than attractive, less than smart, less unique and less worthy of love. This is happening to both genders, with boys facing stereotypes of what masculinity should look, sound and feel like online.

“Young girls are bombarded with images of what they’re told is the beauty standard and are constantly measuring themselves while feeling like they’re coming up short. They see that girls or women who are closer to meeting this arbitrary beauty standard have more likes, followers and all-around attention from boys and girls alike. They see in real time the comments that boys make on pictures and profiles. Everywhere they look, whether it be on social media, TV, movies or magazines, the need for them to look and act a certain way to be of value continues to be cemented into their psyche. That’s why the monologue in the ‘Barbie’ movie on the impossible double standards of being a woman made so many women cry.

“With social media being available to kids at such a young age, this assault begins much earlier now and contributes to the ever-growing rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation and lack of knowing oneself.”

As if it weren’t hard enough to be a parent in 2025. Now there’s one more place boys can be exposed to the worst kind of influence at a time when their hormonal bodies are exploding.

“Adolescence” is being widely praised for starting a conversation about how parents, teachers and siblings can better watch for warning signs that young ones are being subtly or overtly radicalized.

Experts advise parents to actively listen for when their sons give voice to harmful cliches or stereotypes about women. For example: Do they use the word “woke” as a compliment or an insult? Do they refer to women in reductive ways, like “girls” or “bimbos”? Should your kid say something like, “All women are gold diggers,” or, “Women have it easier than men,” that is an invitation to open a conversation.

Parents take it all in

“Adolescence” goes to great pains to show that Jamie’s parents are both good people and good parents. That the police and legal systems mean well. That the teachers and social workers mean well. But in their own ways, they are all overmatched by the lightning-fast changes in social media, where the critical meaning of an emoji can change from day to day.

As a father, Morgan’s first response to seeing “Adolescence” was gratitude that his son is 17, not 13, meaning he’s made it through the scariest years for a parent. “I’m just very glad that this has not been our experience,” he said. “My son and his friends have always been very respectful and very into equality, and I think a lot of that comes from the example that their parents are trying to set.”

Still, “Adolescence” served as a stark reminder that no kid is ever fully free from internet susceptibility.

“I think the whole point of the show is that once our children go into their rooms, once those doors are closed, once they get on those devices and get into their groups, there’s just no way for us to know entirely what they’re being exposed to.”

(His son is rolling his eyes as he says this. He continues.)

“We can even ask, we can badger, we can do all of the things, but parents can only do so much — and they can know only so much — as our kids start to get older and separate from us.

“I think the show sums up every parent’s feeling that you’re never doing enough. The joy and the curse of parenthood is that you can only do so much and there’s so much that’s out of your control.”

Hinshaw feels blessed to be just past the generation of first-wave parents who were “completely caught off-guard and unprepared for what the full thrust of total access to the internet and social media can do to your children,” she said. “Because we’re really just starting to understand the full-brunt brute force of harm that all of this access can do to kids.”

Hinshaw and her husband have amended their initial plan to give their son his first smartphone at age 13. Adjusting to changing times and new information, she said, they mutually decided — with their son’s participation and consent — that a flip phone will work just fine for him till he’s 16.

How to process it all

When I finished “Adolescence,” I took to Facebook to encourage people to watch it, and it quickly became clear just how close to the bone the show is touching audiences. When I praised young actor Owen Cooper’s portrayal of Jamie as “otherworldly,” a distraught reader tore into me, saying: “You do understand that kid viciously stabbed a girl to death?”

She had watched the entire series and was so taken in by it, she thought it had been a documentary. When Hinshaw first learned about “Adolescence,” she said, “I had no idea what I was saying yes to as I clicked play.”

When she got to the end of the final episode, her husband and son were long asleep in bed. In the gut-wrenching final scene (spoiler alert!), Jamie’s tearful father is talking to his absent son in the only way he now can — through the stuffy toy he’s now tucking into Jamie’s bed. Perhaps in a way he hasn’t talked with his real son, maybe ever. He’s clearly in a kind of pain that is going to burn inside him for the rest of his life.

End of story.

Hinshaw sat alone on the couch in stunned silence. Then she started sobbing.

“It was everything I could do not to wake up both my husband and my child and check in about everything,” she said.

Instead, “I decided to quietly go into my son’s room and lie down next to him and put my arm around him and just be there with him and listen to him breathe. That became the thing that I could do without disturbing him.”

The next morning, she asked her son for his phone code, and he gave it to her without asking why. He got it. They went through his text messages together.

“It was a strange confirmation that we’re on an OK path because while I haven’t done it in a while, he did know that this is what we do,” she said.

“But yeah, I mean, it really hit home.”

Every parent’s nightmare.

John Moore is The Denver Gazette’s senior arts journalist. Email him at john.moore@gazettedev.gazette.com.