In an early scene of Bad Boy, an award-winning Israeli drama series that has just arrived on Netflix, Tamara Scheinman opens her front door to find the hallway of her apartment building crowded with police. Dawn has yet to break, but they’ve already secured a warrant to search the harried single mom’s home and arrest the older of her two sons, Dean (Guy Manster). “I asked them not to come,” Tamara (Neta Plotnik) insists to the social worker accompanying the cops. “I called because I got scared.” Over her protestations—and his refusal to get dressed—they drag the boy out of bed and into a squad car, where he rides to the station in his underwear.
For some 130 million viewers who have, according to Netflix, made Adolescence the platform’s third-most-watched English-language series of all time, the scene is bound to look familiar. That miniseries opens with a remarkably similar situation: the police, the shocked family, the early-morning stillness, the young suspect roused from his bed. At 13, Dean is even the same age as Adolescence’s middle school murderer. Which is not to say Bad Boy is a ripoff; in fact, it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023 before airing in Israel last year. But Netflix surely knew what it was doing in unveiling the show just as Adolescence was slipping off its viewership charts. In truth, though, the series have little in common besides their setup. And the inevitable comparison doesn’t favor Bad Boy, whose often engaging but disjointed, tonally incoherent take on juvenile detention falls short of its focused and insightful predecessor.
While Adolescence used its baby-faced killer as a way to explore misogyny among a generation that has never enjoyed a day without social media, Bad Boy follows its protagonist to juvie with a less-defined agenda. An unnecessarily elliptical narrative structure, with multiple timelines, leaves the…
