During this particular TV season, it’s easy to understand why parents, especially those of young men, have experienced all manner of visceral reactions to both ripped-from-the-headlines and smaller-scale storylines.
Describing the first scene of “Adolescence” to IndieWire’s Toolkit podcast, in which the audience enters the limited series through the eyes of the detectives raiding a family’s home, creator/star Stephen Graham said, “I wanted to grab the audience by the scruff of the neck and that camera moving up through that house and going into a boy’s bedroom and have police point guns at ’em.”
Naturally, it’s disorienting to hear that a 13-year-old boy is being arrested for murder, but by the third episode in the lauded series, viewers see a switch flip. Suddenly, they have an understanding of the environment the child was raised in — and what information was being fed to him inside of it — and they can more readily see how someone so young developed a capacity for such violence.
That idea of nature versus nurture, and to what degree parents are responsible for the actions of their children, is at the core of several top series this Emmys season, primarily in the Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series race.
“Disclaimer,” the Apple TV+ literary adaptation helmed by Alfonso Cuarón, takes place on two timelines, both of which explore how a parent’s experience can negatively affect their child, even if that is not their intention. At the Venice Film Festival, where the series first premiered, star Louis Partridge told IndieWire that much of the work in revealing his character Jonathan’s true nature stemmed from Cuarón describing his mother Nancy, played by Lesley Manville, as a “monster.”
“When you see Jonathan, how he is without the bias of his mother, a lot of those traits have come from her,” said the young actor. “I did a bit of research into narcissistic personality disorder and all that, which I found out is an inherited trait, it’s not something you’re born with. It’s given to you often — mother to son, father to daughter — and so if your mother suffers from it and treats you as an extension of herself or this golden child … it’s understandable that they would grow up and have the same views. You see that towards the end, you see Nancy and you think, ‘OK,’ you can see how Jonathan is a product of that living environment.”
The harm that the Brigstocke family inflicts upon Catherine Ravenscroft, played by Cate Blanchett in the show’s main timeline, and Leila George in flashback, is core to a more modern depiction of parenting on the limited series. Catherine’s trauma is key to understanding her own son, the disaffected Nicholas, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.
He told IndieWire, “His coping mechanism of her trying to deal with an unknown pain could be something that is more destruction, and that he learned from his father. But he still has this innate quality of innocence and empathy that comes from his mother, but he doesn’t know how to place them or assert them in the world.”
That journey of trying to unpack the “deeper aspects of his psyche” even bleeds into the clothes he wears and the music he listens to, emphasizing how deeply he cannot comprehend his place in the world.
Cuarón was compelled by the idea that the series could show how nurturing can affect a kid like Nicholas. “With Catherine, you see the dynamic in which you have a son who’s rejecting the mother, the father who’s the friend of the son. But that’s a kind of a dynamic in which it’s very clear that Nicholas is having this great relation with the father for the benefit of the mother, meaning for the mother to feel even more insulated by contrast,” he said. “And [his father] Robert at the same time loves to show his relationship. Pretending is all the mess of, ‘I’m doing it as a good dad and I’m trying to be supportive,’ when what the only thing he’s doing is pretty much thinking that he’s manipulating Nicholas.”
Though it is a fully period piece, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” also reflects a modern conversation about nature versus nurture in raising sons. At an event for the series in New York City last fall, star Nicholas Alexander Chavez described Lyle Menendez as a “masked character” who “starts the series by needing to emulate nearly all of his father’s behavior.”
However, the arc of his portrayal of the real life tabloid fixture showed “it’s really hard when developmentally you feel like a 10-year-old boy, and then you feel it necessary to present as a big, successful record label executive, despite not having the actual nurturing that would go along with that,” said Chavez. “It’s interesting to watch the mask slip over the course of Episodes 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then eventually you kind of see the child underneath.”
Though Season 2 of the hit Netflix anthology series from producer Ryan Murphy focuses on how his character Jose Menendez individually affected the actions of his sons, Javier Bardem also emphasized how the overall environment in which people grow up has serious ramifications. “I’ve been raised into that [machista], and it’s something that I fight against every day in my life,” said the Oscar-winning actor, referencing a version of a problematic masculine ideal prevalent in Spain. “My father was a product of that education. And I don’t know about here, but in Spain, there are murders every month of men killing their wives because they are super macho men, and that’s what they do, and it’s fucking disgusting.”
He added, “We are still prisoners of that education, and we have so much to learn.”
