‘Adolescence’ Writer Jack Thorne On Internet Safety, The Beatles, And The Netflix Show That Got Everyone Talking: “There Is A Problem…”

Most shows take years to become part of the world’s consciousness, but Netflix show Adolescence did it within weeks of its debut in March of this year. One could try to be smart and say, well of course it did, since it’s a Plan B production, but even the collective wisdom of Brad Pitt’s company couldn’t have known that a gritty drama, set in a small town in the north of England, would reverberate in the way it did. But by being true to its core idea and rejecting all the stereotypical tropes of TV crime series, Adolescence made viewers think in a way that maybe they hadn’t thought before. Because it seemed real. Uncomfortably real.

Compared to most four-part series of its kind, not a lot actually happens in Adolescence. The main event happens for the most part off-screen: 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) is accused of murdering a girl in his class at school, and his guilt is established at the end of the very first episode. But this isn’t a whodunit. The power of Adolescence is the way the enormity of this crime plays out over time, starting with the arrest, then the investigation, then the psychological report, and, finally, the family’s attempts to deal with it all.

The show followed hard on the heels of the 2021 film Boiling Point, a collaboration between Adolescence star Stephen Graham, who plays Jamie’s father Eddie, and director Philip Barantini. It was a one-take drama in which Graham plays a chef on the edge, and the format suited the tension of the situation. With Adolescence, though, Barantini and Graham went a step further, in no small part thanks to writer and co-creator Jack Thorne. By forensically focusing on four specific hours in the crime being covered, Adolescence took audiences quietly but firmly into their worst nightmares. In the ’60s, the question was, “Do you know where your children are?” Today, the question is, “Do you know who your children are?”

Adolescence made such a big impact that Prime Minister Keir Starmer held a summit at his home in Downing Street, and it quite likely had some bearing on the Online Safety Act, rolled out in increments. Now, in the UK, certain sites — some of them pornographic but not all —need “age assurance”, a measure that Thorne is wary of endorsing.

“I think the government needs to be doing something more radical,” he says. “I know that that will make me unpopular amongst certain free speech defenders, but why should kids be given unfettered access to such an addictive substance? [The internet] is addictive, and we know it’s addictive. We’re all addicted. Some people are saying, ‘Well, we need to deal with our addiction first.’ But can’t we prevent them from falling into our traps, at least while their brains are the most plastic they’re ever going to be? Can’t we protect them from what we’re dragging them into? Saying we’ll put age verification on certain sites [is not enough]. Kids will find a way around that, because kids are a lot cleverer than we are — and a lot more sophisticated with this technology than we are.”

Here, Thorne talks about the show and his upcoming projects, which include The Hack, about the very British News International phone-hacking scandal, an adaption of William Golding’s schoolboy survival story Lord of the Flies, and Sam Mendes’s Beatles project.

DEADLINE: When did you realize that Adolescence was starting to take off? And, more importantly, when did you realize that people were getting it?

JACK THORNE: There are two answers to that question. The first is, I am a ratings and TV nerd, so I check FlixPatrol, and I check all those weird websites that tell you all sorts of things about what’s number one and where in the world. I was checking that right from the start, which is really sad of me and I’m pathetic for doing so, but I was. [Laughs.] The second was when I started getting letters and emails. Not from people in the industry but mates from school, who were like, “I’ve just had a conversation with my 14-year-old that I never expected to have.” Those started rolling in, literally on day three. I was starting to get really emotional and personal messages from old friends. That was when it was like, “This is really doing something that I wasn’t expecting it to do.”

DEADLINE: It’s been well covered but do you mind going back to the beginning of the process and explaining what you wanted to do with this story?

THORNE: Yeah, it started with Stephen. Phil and Stephen had been talking. Phil had talked to Plan B, and Plan B had suggested this idea of doing a TV show. I don’t think they ever suggested doing a Boiling Point TV show, but a TV show that would use the one-shot in some way. Then Stephen phoned me up and said, “Phil and I have been talking. We think we can do a one-shot show, and I want to do it about knife crime. I think there’s a way of doing different angles on the same crime.”

And it all started from there. Stephen had pretty clear ideas in his head about how he wanted certain things to work. The biggest idea he had in his head was, “I don’t want to blame the parents. I don’t want to make this a show that says, “This happened because Jamie had an alcoholic mother or an abusive father.” As soon as you eliminate that, and as soon as you decide that, at the end of Episode One, Jamie is going to be guilty, then it becomes a case of, “OK, how do we make this story as chaotic as Jamie’s brain? How do we get inside that head and create spheres of blame for him?”

DEADLINE: How did that evolve?

THORNE: I talked to Stephen until we had an idea of how each episode would work. Then I’d go away and work with Mariella [Johnson], who researches and builds stuff with me. What we do is, we do all the research on procedure — on what would actually happen — so that we’ve got all that detail down. Then as soon as I had all that stuff down, I talked to Stephen again and just checked in with him about how everything would work, story-wise. As soon as we were totally secure, that’s when I’d start writing. [Laughs.] I’d always be the typist. I was always the typist. Stephen and I would talk, but I was always the typist.

DEADLINE: How long did it take to research? Were people willing to talk about this? It’s quite a dark subject.

THORNE: The amazing thing is, there’s always people that will talk about it, and there are always people that are interested in the process enough and want to tell stories about what they’ve been through, whether you’re talking to someone who understands police procedure or someone who understands the legal system. What you then try to do is create layers. So, you’re constantly saying, “OK, so this is what’s happening in the story at this point. What would the lawyer be doing in this situation?” The police might give you one answer, but the lawyer will say, “Actually, I’d be doing something else.” You’re creating a map, and you’re trying to understand how all the different players play a role within that map, because, with this show, the camera can’t travel anywhere without a story.

DEADLINE: A literal map?

THORNE: That’s what Phil and Stephen instilled into me. It literally was, “You can’t ever cheat. You can’t ever have the camera travel without a character.” If the camera is traveling with a character, then that character has to have a story. So, in the first episode, we were working out what that police officer’s story was. Later on, we were working out what the lawyer’s story was. We were building this mad spider diagram. Then it was the case of forgetting that entire spider diagram while we were trying to actually write the show.

DEADLINE: Do you have one of those corkboards covered with pictures and pieces of red string to link them all together?

THORNE: I don’t. [Laughs.] I try and keep it all in my head, and I rely on Mariella’s head to be more secure than my own. But that bit of research, where it’s straightforward, doesn’t take too long. The stuff that takes a lot longer is going into incel culture and trying to understand all that stuff and trying to talk to young people. Because whilst there are coppers who are very happy to talk to you, finding ways where it’s safe for kids to talk to you is a bit harder.

DEADLINE: How did you do that? Where did you get that information from?

THORNE: Just by finding different means by which to do it. Each time, it was slightly different.

DEADLINE: Can you be a bit more specific? Did you have focus groups with kids?

THORNE: No, nothing that organized. It was always about finding people that are happy to talk to you and then getting them to talk. And spending a lot of time online. I never catfished anybody. I never pretended to be someone I was not; I was just looking at videos and trying to understand. I wasn’t ever interested in what

Andrew Tate makes, but I was very interested in what people around Jamie’s age make. You watch a video that’s largely about, say, Dune, but in the end, they start talking about their relationships with women and chiming in on how they feel about the world. Once you’re involved in that chat, you get a very clear sense of young people very quickly.

DEADLINE: How did that affect the story you set out to tell? You say you set out to tell a story about knife crime, but, in a way, it isn’t really about knife crime. I think that’s the genius of the show — it doesn’t really explain anything. There are contributing factors, but there isn’t really a reason. There isn’t a motive. There isn’t a rationale.

THORNE: I’m pleased you think so. I’m really, really pleased you think so. Yes. That was the aim. What we were trying to do was tell a story of complication rather than simplicity. We weren’t trying to make a polemic. But I’d say that it is about knife crime, in that it was about the fact that we were noticing that there were more and more crimes involving knives, cases of boys hurting girls. That increase was the thing that interested us, so, trying to investigate what is going on for young boys right now — that was the starting point of it.

Incel culture came as a surprise to both of us. It wasn’t in our original conception of the show at all. It came when I was flailing around; I’d written a draft that we were working on, and I was flailing around, going, “Jamie just doesn’t feel full enough to me. There’s something that I’m not understanding.” I was going through various different iterations of what could be behind it, creating dark secrets, doing stuff that was quite conventional, really. It was Mariela who said, “I think you need to look at incel culture.”

As soon as I read a particular statistic — that, supposedly, 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men — I thought, “If I was 13 and I heard that, I’d believe it. I’d believe that no woman is ever going to find me attractive. I’d believe that I’m not in that group of 20% men. I’d be certain I’m not.” Then, suddenly, Jamie started to make sense, which isn’t to say that Jamie is solely a product of incel culture because — like you say — we don’t ascribe blame to anything. What we do is, we give degrees of blame to all sorts of different places.

DEADLINE: When I first heard it was four hour-long episodes, I immediately thought the four hours would simply follow on from each other, like 24.

THORNE: You know what? We never considered doing four consecutive hours. It’s weird. You said that, and I’m thinking, “Oh yeah, we should have talked about that. That could have worked.” [Laughs.]

DEADLINE: How did you come down to the four situations you chose?

THORNE: There were some ideas that Stephen came to me with from the beginning, and there was other stuff [that came up] where it was like, “OK, we need to go into schools. We’re not doing this properly unless we look inside the school system.” Stephen always had Jamie meeting a psychiatrist as one of the episodes, even — I think — when he talked to me for the first time, so that was always on the cards. Then the paint scene [in the last episode], I think came as a result of us talking together. Stephen had just turned 50, so it was like, “OK, how we can join all these dots together in order to create a portrait of this family?” The third episode, the psychiatrist episode, that was a real rugby pass of just him going, “Write a David Mamet play. OK, bye.” That was literally what he said to me, and, yeah, that was the one where I went into dark places on my own.

DEADLINE: This must be the only Stephen Graham project where his character says, “I’ve never set foot inside a police station” …

THORNE: That was really important for Eddie. That was really important to show who Eddie was, and the fact that — and we talked about that quite a lot — the police invade his home and he’s angry, but he’s also polite. That’s the way he’s been brought up. He has a fear of authority. He doesn’t have an understanding of how they work. I think that’s so beautiful in Stephen’s performance, how he finds that.

I would say that, because I love Stephen — not just as an actor, I love him as a person — in every part of this process, I was trying to write him. Not to say that he’s just like Eddie, but he has Eddie’s decency, and he has Eddie’s kindness and love, and he has Eddie’s ability to look at himself. There’s lots of stuff within Eddie that isn’t developed enough to be Stephen, but that decency is there. I always said about this show, it was like you had a general at the front who was like, “Come on guys, let’s go!” That general was a mixture of Phil and Stephen. They’re just so fearless, the pair of them, as they joined arms together. Stephen has that general in him. I’ve seen that general in Stephen in virtually every project I’ve done with him. It’s always remarkable how he uses that power, that power of persuasion that’s deep within him. He’s got so much charisma, and it comes out all the time.

DEADLINE: How did you approach the school scenes?

THORNE: I was a learning support worker in a school. I worked in a school. My parents were teachers at different times, not through most of their career, but I’d spent a fair amount of time with them. Hannah Walters, who’s Stephen’s wife, but also our exec producer on it, had been a drama teacher. Me and Hannah talked a lot about how we were going to paint this picture of Jamie’s school. Yeah, we went into schools, but really, we knew the sort of school we wanted to paint. It’s a school that’s failing, a school that’s not doing so well, and I’ve seen inside a few of those schools. The brief moment with Jamie’s form tutor is significant, where he basically just says, “I can’t control them.” He’s just such a coward in terms of how he teaches. I do think that tells a lot of the story of how Jamie had spiraled quite so severely through this process, because that duty of care just wasn’t there.

DEADLINE: Did you go into schools for things like this?

THORNE: Yeah, yeah, a bit, but really, that was from my memory.

DEADLINE: Bullying, nowadays, though, is very different to what it used to be, of course…

THORNE: Yes. It was weird, the response to the show. There were teachers that said, “No way would that happen in the school,” and yet there were other teachers that said, “You’ve got that spot on.” I think that speaks to what’s going on at the moment in our schools, which is just that some are allowed to rise, and others are allowed to sink. We’re not protecting the sinking schools enough.

But there is a problem. I’ve spoken to teachers, and I’ve spoken to teaching unions about this. There’s a problem with attention. Keeping kids involved in class has become very hard. There’s also a problem with female teachers, who are finding it very, very hard to teach. I have only anecdotal evidence for this, but female teachers are saying that they’re not only being verbally abused, they’re being also physically abused by boys. I was also talking to girls who said things like, “I don’t speak in class, because there’s a group of boys that aren’t very nice, that intimidate me.” That’s happening. That’s why there is a big movement about how we deal with smartphones. Different schools are doing different strategies and it’s distressing that the government isn’t really helping.

DEADLINE: The interesting thing is that, after all this, it ends with a very introspective episode, and it’s all on Stephen’s shoulders. Did you talk to the families of criminals?

THORNE: No. We knew how to tell that story. I think I’d read some stuff, but no, I didn’t talk to anyone that had children that had walked down anything like the same path as Jamie. I felt like we could create that. We knew where we wanted Eddie to go, and we knew who we wanted Eddie to be. I did read some stuff, but I didn’t have any one-to-one conversations. When I was doing Best Interests, a BBC show about parents having to decide whether to fight with hospitals about whether to keep their child alive, we sat down with a few parents then, and it was excruciating. We did learn some things, but the pain we were putting them through was unbearable. There wasn’t a need for us to put our hands in someone’s wounds with this one.

DEADLINE: How did you decide where to leave it, then? It begins with such a bang. How did you know where it was going to end?

THORNE: I think that happened quite organically. As soon as we worked out what that final phone call was going to be, it was a case of the parents looking themselves in the eye and trying to work out how to survive and trying to work out what they can take from it.

DEADLINE: As soon as it aired in the UK, we had Keir Starmer and his government discussing the show at the highest levels. Did that take you by surprise? Because that kind of thing hasn’t happened since the ‘60s, when Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home first aired.

THORNE: It took me hugely by surprise, and it was a huge responsibility, but I’ll tell you what happened on that day in 10 Downing Street. It wasn’t us walking in there. I think that became the story, but it wasn’t us walking in there to give our advice, because we don’t have any advice to give. We knew how to write this show, and we tried to come up with a good question. But we didn’t try and write any answers, like you say.

What Netflix lined up, brilliantly, was a group of people who did know what they were talking about — the Children’s Society, NSPCC, Movember — people who went in there and they talked to Keir Starmer about the crisis, and they talked to Keir Starmer about possible solutions to that crisis. We said very little around that table. We were the Trojan horse that brought other people to that table, and he did listen very sincerely. It didn’t feel like a publicity stunt. It felt like he was someone who was grappling with something. Thankfully, he wasn’t turning to us as to what to do. He was turning to people that actually know what they’re talking about, that have spent their lives working in this space.

DEADLINE: What are you working on at the moment?

THORNE: The Hack’s about to come out in September, and I’m really excited about that. It’s about the phone hacking scandal. We’re in the edit of Lord of the Flies, which is really fun.

DEADLINE: What can you reveal about either of those things, if possible?

THORNE: The Hack is a completely different side to David Tennant, an aspect of him that you’ve never seen before. It’s Bobby Carlyle doing something very different, too. It’s about the phone-hacking scandal, but it’s the phone-hacking scandal from the inside of it; it’s two sides of the same coin that then reveal the truth of what was going on during that time. You see them working out how to fight and it’s really, really difficult. It was a very, very difficult show to write. We were working with the Mr. Bates vs The Post Office lot, who are incredible researchers. Getting every detail right, and walking the legal minefield of the hacking scandal, was very complicated.

DEADLINE: And what can you say about Lord of the Flies?

THORNE: It’s astonishingly beautiful. The cast are incredible, and Marc Munden wields a camera like a brush — he’s really done something that I’ve not seen happen on TV before, in terms of just his rhythm and the way he tells stories. I feel like I’m a very small part of the authorship of that show. I think it’s Marc’s show, and I think he’s one of the great TV directors. Great directors, not just TV directors. It’s just wonderful to see him use every color in his box.

DEADLINE: What attracted you to that show, that idea of retelling that story?

THORNE: It’s a book that I loved. Joe Wilson, who’s the exec on it, is a mate of mine. I was round his house, and he said, “Go on, then. What’s the book? What’s the book you’d walk over glass to do?” I said, “Lord of the Flies, but I’ve tried and it’s not possible.” He went to work and said, “I think it might be possible.” It took a long time talking to the estate to convince them that we had a take that would be respectful of the story, but the estate went with us. I think it’s just a brilliant, brilliant book. I tell you — really, as a kid, it’s one experience. But reading it as an adult, it’s completely different. It’s completely different.

DEADLINE: Do you think that Golding’s influence seeped into Adolescence?

THORNE: I think I fell into Adolescence in terms of my awkward teenage years, and I think the reason why I loved Lord of the Flies is because I was an awkward teenager. I’d say that I’m equal parts Adrian Mole and Simon from Lord of the Flies. So, yeah, I think that fed in a bit.

DEADLINE: You probably can’t speak about this, but are you still involved in Sam Mendes’s Beatles project?

THORNE: I am, but I cannot speak about it. Genuinely, I’m so frightened of saying the wrong thing that I really can’t talk about it.

DEADLINE: Can we take it you’re a Beatles fan?

THORNE: I’m a Beatles fan, yes. And I’m a Sam Mendes fan. So, there we go.