Stranger Than Fiction: How a TV Show Radicalised Journalists Against Media Literacy

Netflix drops a provocative new series about a teenage boy spiralling into online-fuelled violence, and surprise the confected outrage machine goes into overdrive ding! ding! ding! Headlines blare that Adolescence "proves boys are dangerous, feral beasts and need their phones taken away." Moral pundits nod sagely, talking heads clutch their pearls: See? Smartphones turned our sons into monsters, into raging, feral beasts. It’s a full-blown media panic – and a case study in how not to interpret fiction. In a departure from my usual authorial milieu let's try and find some humour in this situation.

Boys, Phones, and a Moral Panic

The show in question, Adolescence, is dark, twisted, and brilliantly made. (Single-take episodes! Incel rabbit holes! A 13-year-old boy who commits murder!) Every inch has been constructed to slap you from your stupor, to entertains us, not to spoon-feed you the government's next policy memo. But the media reaction? Utterly unironic. They have painted on their warpaint (clown makeup) and are ready to take on this evil (A fictional narrative). One commentator flat-out declared that “smartphones are poison for boys’ minds” and implied it’s time to treat iPhones like packs of cigarettes¹. Another opined that the real villain of Adolescence is the smartphone itself — solution: no child should ever have one¹. In other words, the takeaway for some has been: teen boys + internet = ticking time bombs. Nuance? I think I that was the name of great aunt up in the highlands.

This kind of sweeping conclusion from a TV drama to all boys are doomed, sick, killers reveals a severe lack of media literacy. It’s as if the majority of pundits forgot that a Netflix miniseries is scripted entertainment, not peer-reviewed research. Sure, Adolescence shines a light on real issues (misogyny online, the so-called “manosphere,” Andrew Tate-esque influencers). But the key word is light – it illuminates, it doesn’t automatically prove every teenage boy is a budding psychopath unless we confiscate his phone at gunpoint. Yet here we are, with columns treating Jamie (the show’s troubled 13-year-old) as your average lad on the street. It’s like watching someone cite Breaking Bad in a drug policy debate or a during double chemistry: great story, wrong playbook.

Media literacy 101: Recognise fiction can exaggerate for effect. Adolescence is a fever dream, a hyperbolic worst-case scenario. By design, it compresses an array of youth issues – radicalisation, bullying, parental cluelessness – into one narrative arc that’s light-years away from your average teen's online, or offline, experience. That’s why it’s drama not an episode of dispatches (read: a PBS special). But many in press swallowed it whole. As if they’d stumbled on a documentary from the future. British politicians even discussed it in Parliament with grave concern, as if a TV show had sounded the alarm on an national emergency¹. The irony is rich: the same media that frets about teens being unable to separate online fantasy from reality is… unable to separate online fantasy from reality. It's as if every right-thinking journalist on the planet has written a 1,500 word column on the clear and present danger posed by Elves to the good citizens of Azeroth, or the danger posed n Kings Landing by the return of dragons.

Provocative Fiction vs. Real-World Data

Lets get one thing straight: Adolescence is fiction. Gripping, slick, perhaps to plausible for comfort at times, but still fiction. By all means, let’s use it to spark conversation about teens and the internet. But let’s not pretend a Netflix crime drama gives us a statistically representative sample of teenage boys. For that, we have actual research (you know, those boring non-Netflix things with charts and survey data). And the research paints a more a far messier picture – one that in many ways contradicts the “boys + phones = dangerous” hysteria.

First off, if we’re keeping score on digital harm, teen girls have been far more adversely affected in recent years. Our teenage girls are getting one-shotted by social media. The data is staggering: In the U.S., nearly 3 in 5 teen girls felt “persistently sad or hopeless” in 2021 – double the rate of boys – and that figure for girls jumped by almost 60% in the past decade². Rates of anxiety and depression among girls have skyrocketed since smartphones and social media became ubiquitous. Even more alarming, self-harm and suicidal behaviours surged among teen girls. A British study found that reports of self-harm by girls ages 13–16 jumped 68% in just three years, whereas boys’ rates hardly budged³. In plain English: adolescent girls are in crisis, emotionally. And a lot of credible experts link that trend, at least in part, to the pressures and anxieties amplified by social media³.

Now compare this to boys: Yes, teen boys are struggling too – mental health is taking a dip in teens across the board – but generally their internal issues (depression, self-harm) haven’t spiked nearly as sharply as girls’. In fact, by many measures, girls’ well-being has taken a nosedive while boys’ declines are more modest². This isn’t to play Oppression Olympics or say “poor boys have it easy” (they don’t; they face different challenges, about which more in a moment). It’s to underscore that the real teen phone crisis might be the one happening in girls’ shredding their self worth on Instagram, in DMs, and TikTok feeds, not boys’ gaming chats. So when media coverage hyperventilates that Adolescence proves “boys are dangerous,” it’s missing where a lot of the actual danger lies: in girls hurting themselves, quietly and invisibly, under the influence of perfectly curated social media feeds. But this doesn't make for a sexy headline, so it doesn't get the rapturous reporting.

Speaking of Instagram: digital crack that is freebased by millions of teenage girls has been called out by researchers – including Facebook’s own internal researchers – for exacerbating body image issues. One leaked Facebook study famously admitted “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls”⁴. This isn't just one of those hyperbolic headlines, it's real: a third of teen girls who already felt bad about their bodies said Instagram made them feel even worse. Teens also reported that Instagram led to increases in anxiety and depression, unprompted⁴. And this isn’t fringe science; these were Facebook’s internal findings, reluctantly made public after much denial. So if Adolescence had been about a 13-year-old girl spiralling into anorexia or self-harm due to Instagram toxicity, it might actually reflect a broader epidemic. Instead, the show chose to depict a boy drawn into violent misogyny in full incel-terror mode. That’s a real phenomenon too – but it’s rare compared to the daily psychological carnage teen girls face online.

How Girls and Boys Really Use Their Phones

Why the gap? A big reason is how girls use the tech versus boys. Girls are glued to social media — selfies, likes, endless scrolls of perfection posting selfies, commenting, scrolling for hours on end. Boys, on the other hand, often have a different digital diet. A Pew Research survey confirms what any parent might guess: teen girls dominate visually-focused, friend-centric platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, while teen boys are more likely to be found on YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit⁵. In other words, girls are more immersed in the social comparison vortex (Instagram’s filtered photos, TikTok dances, Snap streaks), whereas boys gravitate to gaming videos, meme forums, and virtual battlefields. The average 15-year-old boy is more likely to be watching Minecraft tutorials or grinding for weapon skins in Call of Duty than curating the perfect selfie or counting likes. One’s a comparison meat grinder; the other’s a sweaty escape hatch.

This matters because not all screen time is created equal. Psychologists like Jean Twenge (who study generational trends) have found that heavy social media use correlates strongly with mental health issues, especially for girls – but other screen activities (like gaming or watching videos) have a weaker association⁵. For example, one finding was that teens who use social media 5+ hours a day are about twice as likely to be depressed as those who don’t use it. Conversely gaming or streaming TV barely moves the needle. The mental health risk “curve” goes up steeply after just an hour of social media use per day, but it stays relatively flatter for digital activities like gaming until you hit several hours⁵. So, two hours scrolling Instagram is not the same as two hours playing Minecraft, grinding for Robucks (I don't know what Roblox is or how it works, and I don't intend to learn for this post), or parachuting in with your squad on Fortnite.

Your typical teen girl in 2025 might spend her evening meticulously editing a photo for Instagram, then anxiously checking every few minutes to see how many hearts and comments it got, and then spiral into despair if it doesn’t measure up. Whereas her male counterpart is more likely to spend that same evening in a group voice chat, cracking jokes over a FIFA match on PlayStation, or binge-watching YouTube clips about obscure Minecraft hacks until 2 AM. Who’s more likely to go to bed feeling insecure or bullied? My money’s on the girl who’s refreshing her like count. It’s no wonder significantly more teen girls say they’d struggle to give up social media than boys do⁶. In one survey, 58% of girls – compared to 49% of boys – said quitting social media would be hard for them (many girls literally sleep with their phones under the pillow), whereas boys were more likely to shrug that it’d be easy to log off⁶. Meanwhile, teen boys are far more likely to have a gaming console at home – 21 points more likely, in fact – which underscores their relative preference for gaming as a pastime⁵.

None of this is to say that boys’ online habits are healthy. Boys face risks too, just different ones. They may not be posting duck-face selfies on Instagram, but a number of teen boys do vanish into other digital rabbit holes – some relatively benign (gaming fandoms, silly YouTube pranks) and some truly dark. Adolescence focuses on one of those darker paths: the lonely boy who stumbles into the toxic “manosphere”, where misogynistic influencers pump his head full of grievances and hate. This does happen in real life, and it’s legitimately worrying. There’s even research to back up how quickly a curious teenage boy can be inundated with extremist content: One recent study showed that fresh social media accounts made to look like 16-year-old boys could be fed extremist anti-women content by algorithms in under 30 minutes⁷. Imagine: your son signs up for TikTok, likes a couple of bodybuilding or “alpha male” videos, and within 23 minutes the app is suggesting clips of some woman-hating podcaster ranting about “females.” It’s frightening stuff (if you've spent the last two decades in a cave and know nothing about the internet).

But – and here’s where nuance matters – most teen boys who play Fortnite or watch Andrew Tate videos do not end up stabbing one of their mates, just as most girls who envy Instagram models do not develop full-blown eating disorders. If you just followed the media frenzy around Adolescence you would not have picked up this point. Yes, online radicalisation of young men is real, but it’s a minuscule subset of the youth. By contrast, the harms of social media on girls’ mental health are widespread and well-documented, yet we don’t see op-eds thundering that “Instagram proves girls are hopeless and need their phones taken away.” Why? Possibly because when girls suffer, they usually implode (crying in their rooms, hurting themselves) rather than explode. Their pain doesn’t make headlines; it makes hospital stats. Boys lash out and make news – a school fight, a violent crime – so one sensational TV portrayal of a boy’s violence prompts blanket alarm about “dangerous boys.” This double standard in media narratives is as old as time, but it’s stark here: the moralistic conclusion drawn is all about demonising boys and smartphones, instead of understanding the different ways digital life is messing with all kids’ heads.

Cut the Hysteria, Face the Facts

Strip away the sensationalism and a balanced view emerges: Smartphones and social media are not outright evil, but they’re not benign either, neither panacea nor poison They are powerful tools that amplify whatever dark side your common or garden teen has. For girls, that often means intensified feelings of inadequacy – seeing peers’ highlight reels and filtered beauty 24/7, leading to anxiety, depression, body image issues. For boys, it can mean distraction and escape – endless gaming, YouTube rabbit holes – and in worst cases, exposure to toxic ideas or online anger. There are documented impacts on behaviour and development. For instance, heavy screen use (especially at young ages) is associated with shorter attention spans and impulsivity⁸. One study found children under 5 who logged 2+ hours of screen time a day were eight times more likely to be diagnosed with focus and attention disorders like ADHD⁸. Excessive screen time also can impede social and language development in young kids⁸ – when a toddler is glued to an iPad, they’re not interacting with the world or picking up on social cues. These are real concerns, deserving of real strategies from parents, educators, and policymakers.

What’s not helpful is Luddite grandstanding like “ban all teens from phones until age 16 and problem solved.” (Yes, one of Adolescence’s own writers suggested exactly that, calling for an outright smartphone ban for under-16s in Great Britain¹.) Treating phones as the singular root of all evil is a simplification that lets us avoid deeper issues. Why are so many teens drawn to these devices in the first place? What needs are being met digitally that aren’t being met elsewhere? Some experts point out, for example, that lack of fulfilling activities or support can push kids (boys especially) to seek identity and belonging online¹. If a boy has no mentors or healthy outlets, he’s more likely to end up on Reddit at 1 AM soaking up whatever worldview he finds. Confiscating his phone might cut off the symptom, but it doesn’t address the cause.

Media literacy demands discernment. Specifically, that means not drawing straight lines from a fictional story to “this is how it is, full stop.” Treating the show as a provocative spur, rather than a mandate for alarm means appreciating Adolescence as a thought experiment, then asking hard questions and looking at real evidence. The nuanced truth is that smartphones and social media come with trade-offs. They connect teens to friends, information, and creative expression – things we don’t want to categorically deny them. But unmanaged, they also expose teens to bullies, unrealistic beauty standards, addictive feedback loops (hello, TikTok infinite scroll), and fringe communities normalising all manner of unhealthy behaviour. The answer isn’t as tabloid-sexy as “phones are dangerous, take them away.” The task at hand is to equip young people with the tools to navigate the landscape of digital literacy, set healthy boundaries, demand platforms take safety seriously, and pay attention to research rather than the melodrama. A Herculean task given the state of the response to the vastly more straightforward bit of media that prompted this post.

The media’s moral panic over Adolescence has one thing right: we should be talking about what constant connectivity is doing to our kids. But we have to do it intelligently. That means acknowledging Adolescence as an artistic wake-up call, not a literal case study. It means not tarring all teen boys as potential killers because one fictional character snapped. It means focusing just as much (if not more) on the epidemic of depression and self-harm among girls that is happening largely on their screens, silently. It means trading simplistic cries of “ban phones!” for discussions about how phones are used and why they affect girls and boys differently. In short, it requires literacy – both in media and in science.

So, the next time a viral headline screams that a TV show “proves” anything definitive about our youth, take a breath. Remember that real life is messier and less bingeable than a four-part Netflix thriller. By all means, be concerned about what your kids are doing alone in their bedrooms with their phones – but base that concern on reality (which might include reading a CDC report or two) rather than the plot of the latest streaming hit. As Adolescence chillingly highlights, the online world can be a dark place for a vulnerable teen. The solution, however, isn’t to panic and to enact a reflexive ban. The answer lies in education and understanding. Anything less is, frankly, a fiction.

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¹ The media frenzy included opinion pieces with sweeping claims. A British columnist wrote under the headline “Adolescence reveals a terrifying truth: smartphones are poison for boys’ minds”, arguing that the show highlights an urgent need to get teen boys off screens in The Guardian. In The Spectator, a reviewer went so far as to tag their piece with “No child should have a smartphone”, bluntly casting the phone itself as the “true villain” behind the show’s events . These reactions exemplify the literal-minded, alarmist readings of the series. They’re treating a fictional drama as if it were breaking news or a public health study – essentially shouting “This Netflix story proves our kids are doomed by phones!” without a shred of real data. Even one of Adolescence’s creators, writer Jack Thorne, joined the chorus by suggesting smartphones should be banned for under-16s (likening them to cigarettes) in response to the issues his show dramatises in The Guardian. The prevailing sentiment: boys + phones = disaster. It’s a prime example of media (and even creators) inciting what one expert rightly warned is verging on a “moral panic”.

² Teen Girls’ Mental Health Plummeting – According to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 57% of U.S. teen girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021, the highest level in a decade. This is almost double the rate among boys (in 2021, 29% of boys reported such feelings) according to cdc.gov. To put the trend in perspective, in 2011 around 36% of teen girls felt persistently sad – so it’s a ~60% increase in a decade, whereas boys’ rates rose more modestly (from 21% to 29%)cdc.gov. Girls also report higher rates of anxiety, and other research consistently finds girls faring worse than boys on mental wellness indicators in the social media era cdc.gov. In short, teen girls’ well-being has nosedived since smartphones became common, far more dramatically than boys’ – a signal that digital life is hitting girls harder in certain ways.

³ Self-Harm Surge in Girls (GB) – A notable British study found self-harm reports among girls aged 13–16 jumped by 68% between 2011 and 2014 The Guardian. In the same dataset, self-harm rates for boys in that age range were essentially flat during those years The Guardian. This divergence is striking: it suggests an epidemic of self-harm among adolescent girls that was not paralleled among boys. Researchers noted that by 2014, on average, three times as many girls as boys (ages 10–19) were engaging in self-harm The Guardian. While many factors can contribute to self-harm, the timing coincides with the rise of social media use. Experts have pointed to online pressures – cyberbullying, body image obsession, the constant social comparison facilitated by platforms – as likely contributors to this spike in girls’ self-harm The Guardian. It’s a grave reminder that the psychological dangers of the digital age often manifest inwardly and quietly in girls, even as the outward, violent crises (like the one dramatised in Adolescence) grab more headlines.

⁴ Social Media and Body Image – Internal research by Facebook (leaked in 2021) revealed a grim insight: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls” The Verge. This was a direct quote from a slide in a Facebook presentation, acknowledging that among teen girls who already struggled with body image, 32% said Instagram made those issues worse. Another finding from the same trove: in a Facebook study of teens, over 40% of girls who reported feeling “unattractive” traced that feeling back to using Instagram. Unlike TikTok (which is often more about goofy videos or talent) or Snapchat (which has playful filters), Instagram’s emphasis on photos and appearance makes it a “powerful engine for social comparison,” as the Wall Street Journal noted. Teens themselves in these studies explicitly blamed Instagram for spikes in anxiety and depression. Perhaps most chilling: among teens who had experienced suicidal thoughts, Facebook’s research found that 13% of British teen girls and 6% of American teen girls felt those impulses could be directly tied to Instagram use. These stats came straight from Facebook’s own analysts, yet the company downplayed them in public. It’s compelling evidence that certain social media platforms – especially image-centric ones like Instagram – pose unique risks to girls’ mental health and self-esteem.

⁵ Not All Screen Time Is Equal – Research by psychologist Jean Twenge and others indicates that different digital activities have different impacts on teen mental health. Twenge notes that heavy social media users (5+ hours per day) are significantly more likely to be depressed – about twice as likely as teens who don’t use social media at all psychology.sdsu.edu. By contrast, other screen-based pastimes such as watching TV, playing video games, or texting show a weaker link to depression and well-being. In Twenge’s analysis, the “risk curve” for depression starts climbing after as little as 1 hour of social media use per day, whereas for gaming or video watching, the negative effects typically don’t appear until the 3+ hour mark psychology.sdsu.edu. In other words, moderate use of YouTube or Xbox isn’t associated with the same level of harm as moderate use of Instagram or TikTok. This aligns with common sense: scrolling social media tends to involve passive comparison and FOMO, while gaming or watching videos can be more active or escapist without the same constant social feedback loop. Another Pew Research Center survey underscores usage differences: teen boys are more drawn to platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit, while teen girls favor Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat pewresearch.org. Additionally, 95% of teens have smartphones now, but boys are markedly more likely to have access to a gaming console than girls (80% of boys vs. 64% of girls, per Pew) – reflecting that gaming culture is a bigger part of boys’ digital life⁶. All this suggests that girls, on average, spend more time in potentially self-image-damaging online activities, whereas boys spend more time in gaming or online video environments that carry their own issues, but perhaps not the same intensity of psychological harm per hour spent.

⁶ Teen Girls vs. Boys – “Almost Constant” Online: According to Pew data, 35% of all teens say they use at least one of the top online platforms (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook) “almost constantly.” But there are gender differences in specific platforms. For example, teen girls are more likely than boys to be on TikTok “almost constantly” (19% of girls vs 13% of boys, according to one analysis) Bryan Alexander. Girls also outnumber boys in constant Instagram use, while boys lead in constant YouTube use pewresearch.org . Furthermore, teen girls express more attachment to social media: 58% of teen girls said it would be hard to give up social media, compared to 49% of boys. This aligns with anecdotal observations that teen girls feel more social pressure to be online and responsive to friends 24/7. Boys, conversely, were more likely to say giving up social media would be “very easy” for them (25% of boys vs 15% of girls felt that way). However, boys might be underreporting their dependence – they may be less on Instagram, but many are glued to gaming and YouTube. Indeed, the share of teens (boys and girls combined) who are online “almost constantly” has roughly doubled since 2015 (from 24% to 46%), thanks to smartphones. Both genders are more wired than ever; they just engage in different digital diets, which is key to understanding the different outcomes.

⁷ Rapid Radicalization Algorithms – A 2022 study by researchers at Dublin City University’s Anti-Bullying Centre demonstrated how quickly social media algorithms can push a teen towards extremist content. The researchers created blank social media accounts posing as 16–18-year-old boys and observed what content the platforms fed them. On TikTok and YouTube Shorts, it took under 30 minutes for the algorithm to start recommending misogynistic and extremist videos – effectively leading a notional teen boy into the “manosphere” within 23 minutes of usage. This included content laced with anti-feminist themes and other extreme ideologies. The finding substantiates concerns that a casually curious teen (for instance, one who clicks on a couple of innocuous videos about men’s fitness or dating) could rapidly be exposed to far more toxic material without actively seeking it out. It’s a stark illustration of how the design of these platforms – maximizing engagement at all costs – can inadvertently (or perhaps deliberately, via engagement-maximizing algorithms) funnel impressionable youths into echo chambers of hate or violence. So the incel-terror storyline of Adolescence, while highly dramatized, isn’t pure fiction – the mechanism that ensnared the show’s protagonist is very real online. What’s important, though, is to respond to this issue with thoughtful policy (like scrutinizing algorithms or providing better digital literacy education) rather than blanket fear-mongering about all boys with phones. The study’s result is a call to fix the platforms more than to vilify the kids who use them.

⁸ Screens and Attention/Development – Excessive screen time has been linked in numerous studies to attention problems and developmental issues in children and adolescents. For example, a large study cited by the Cleveland Clinic found that kids under 6 who had more than 2 hours of screen time per day were nearly eight times more likely to be diagnosed with attention-related disorders (like ADHD) than those who had <30 minutes per day Discover Magazine. The theory is that rapid-fire, interactive digital content provides constant stimulation and instant gratification, which can condition young brains to expect that level of input – making real-world tasks (that require patience and focus) much harder by comparison Essentially, after hours of quick-succession YouTube videos or video game explosions, a normal classroom or book can seem “dull as watching a plant grow,” as one expert put it. Beyond attention span issues, there are concerns about developmental delays: too much screen use, especially at very young ages, can impede language development and social skills. When a toddler is on a tablet, they’re not engaging in face-to-face interaction, which is crucial for learning things like empathy, reading facial expressions, and conversational cues. Research reviews have noted that excessive screen time in childhood is associated with poorer language acquisition and socio-emotional development PubMed. It’s also tied to sleep disturbances (since screens before bed disrupt melatonin) and higher risk of obesity and mood disorders in. In short, while screens are not satanic devices, there is legitimate evidence that how much, how early, and what kind of screen exposure children have can affect their brain development and behaviour. These effects are more pronounced the younger the child (hence paediatricians urging limits for under-5s), but even for teens, habits like constant multitasking between apps or midnight smartphone use can erode the quality of sleep and focus, indirectly affecting mental health. So, concerns about attention spans and development are not unfounded – they just require a nuanced response (like setting screen time boundaries or ensuring kids also get non-screen activities) rather than simply smashing the smartphone on the driveway.

⁹ Do Video Games Make Boys Violent? – Given that many teen boys spend hours on video games (some of which are violent first-person shooters), it’s natural to ask if that translates to increased real-world aggression. This topic has been studied ad nauseam, and the consensus of recent high-quality research is that video games are not the chief culprit for youth violence. A comprehensive meta-analysis in 2020 looked at 28 longitudinal studies (over 21,000 participants) and found no evidence of a meaningful long-term link between violent video game play and real-life aggressive behavior in youth Royal Socicety NZ. Any small effects observed in earlier studies tended to vanish when better methodologies were used. In fact, the lead author noted that the best studies found effect sizes “statistically indistinguishable from zero,” implying no significant relationship between playing violent games and later aggression or violence. This doesn’t mean a violent game can’t momentarily rev someone up – sure, a teen might feel hyped or irritated after an intense Call of Duty match – but it doesn’t create an underlying propensity to go out and commit violence. Real-world aggression is complex, with factors like family environment, temperament, and social influences playing much larger roles. The Adolescence scenario of a boy committing murder due to online influence is an extreme outlier case. Most gamers, even those who play Grand Theft Auto for hours, distinguish fantasy from reality just fine. Interestingly, as video game popularity has increased over the past 20 years, youth violence has actually declined in many countries – a point often raised by researchers. Of course, moderation matters; spending all day gaming can have other negative effects (poor academics, social isolation, etc.), but the data doesn’t support the idea that games are turning otherwise normal boys into real-life aggressors. So, while the media might be quick to lump together “violent media exposure” with actual teen aggression whenever there’s a troubling incident, the science suggests we should be far more concerned about social isolation, mental illness, or access to weapons than about what’s on a kid’s Xbox. In summary: the claim that “boys + violent video games = ticking time bombs” belongs in the same simplistic basket as the Adolescence panic – intuitive perhaps, but not borne out by real evidence.

© Alexander Cannon – All disclaimers disclaimable, the author notes that he hasn't actually watched the show in question but hears good things about it.