Danny Jarabek
Few shows in recent memory have sparked the kind of conversation that Adolescence has. The four-part Netflix miniseries from creator and writer Jack Thorne, directed by Philip Barantini and starring Stephen Graham alongside breakout talent Owen Cooper, has been hailed as both a staggering technical achievement and a vital cultural inquiry. Shot entirely in a one-take format, the series blends formal complexity with thematic urgency, tackling questions of youth, masculinity, online radicalization, and societal responsibility.
With Adolescence now a critical hit and Emmy nominee, Awards Radar is joined by Jack Thorne to discuss the genesis of the project, the challenges and opportunities of writing for a one-shot series, and the collaboration that brought it to life. The conversation dives deep into Thorne’s creative partnership with Graham and Barantini, the research that shaped Jamie’s character, and the performances, led by Cooper, that have defined the show as one of the year’s most unmissable works.
Read our full conversation with co-creator and writer Jack Thorne below.
Hi, this is Danny Jarabek here with Awards Radar, and I am absolutely delighted to have with me today Jack Thorne, creator and writer of the Netflix hit series Adolescence. Jack, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s an absolute pleasure. Just the praise for the critical acclaim for this show, congratulations as well for the recent Emmy nomination alongside many others involved in the series.
Jack: Thank you. It’s been absolutely wild, and we’re still sort of reeling from it all in a glorious way.
Absolutely. I can’t even imagine. It’s been an incredible run with the series, and I’m so excited to dive a little bit deeper into it with you. I found it absolutely brilliant and remarkable to watch what you brought to the table with the series. I do want to start with your creative partnership on this with Stephen Graham, who you have collaborated with many times in the past, a long-time creative partnership. I’d love to hear the genesis behind this, the conversations that you were having with him to kick off this project.
Jack: Yeah, this is the sixth time Stephen and I have worked together. It’s less a partnership, more a marriage, or it feels like it. We talk all the time. This came up after Boiling Point. I’d been lucky enough to watch an early cut of Boiling Point. Not that there was such a thing as an early cut, but I watched a version before it went out into the world. Stephen knew how much I thought of it. He said to me, “Phil and I have been talking about doing a one-shot TV show.” I said, “I’m in.” Then he said, “I’d like to do something about knife crime.” I said, “I’m in.” That’s where it started. He had some ideas as to how it could play out, and we started from that point on just bouncing ideas back and forth and trying to find our way through it.
So, of course, those things you mentioned, the one-shot series, the knife drama, those are absolutely elements of this. But there is also a much more profound, layered, textured reality to the series with the themes that you’re grappling with, specifically through this young character. What was your research process of learning and understanding and getting to the point of where you wanted to go with the mentality of this character and the cultural phenomenon that had been associated with the series regarding the manosphere, incel culture, and online radicalization? This is a major theme and talking point in society today. And obviously it’s caught a chord here with Adolescence as a claim. So where did you kind of go with bringing that into the fold?
Jack: Stephen had one rule right at the beginning of this process, which was he didn’t want to blame the parents. He didn’t want this to be the sort of easy show that said, “This is because his mom was an alcoholic,” or “This is because his dad was abusive,” or any of those drama clichés. He said, “I don’t want to walk those paths.” I agreed. We started to build Jamie out, but I was struggling because I couldn’t see him fully. The thing we were trying to do with Jamie all the time was create spheres of blame. There was a sphere of blame on the education system. There was a sphere of blame that his parents had to take responsibility for. But he still wasn’t coming into the light. Then someone I worked with said to me, “I think you need to look at incel culture.” I’d heard about incel culture and I was aware of the manosphere, but I hadn’t really gone there. I started to do this deep dive into trying to understand it all. At the same time, we were looking at the criminal justice system, trying to build out those pieces. As soon as I found that statistic central to incel culture—that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men—I thought, yes, I would have believed that when I was 13. That gave me a point where I could understand something growing from. That’s not saying people in incel culture are necessarily violent. It’s not saying that was the sole reason why Jamie acted the way he did. But for me, it was the key component that allowed us to go deeper with everything as we tried to understand this boy.
Yeah, absolutely. You also mentioned your relationship with Philip Barantini and, of course, directing the series. The whole one-shot approach is just phenomenal to witness, the technical achievement of the series brought together. How did you feel that decision was part and parcel of the writing directions that you wanted to go, and how that sort of strategy enhanced the narrative direction you were trying to achieve?
Jack: It was absolutely central to the writing process and changed the way I wrote, and changed the way I think about writing actually. It changed the way I think about writing forevermore because it forced us into conversations about the incomplete. In a normal show, you cut away between different factions in order to get a feel for the whole. Because we couldn’t do that, because we had to by necessity be partial, that meant we had to make decisions about information, what information we were going to give, how we were going to deal with exposition, and how we were going to give a sense of the whole without cutting around it. As soon as we realized we were going to celebrate the fact that we couldn’t tell this story completely, that we had to tell it incompletely, that unlocked something for me. Questions that would normally be the writer’s responsibility to ask weren’t asked. Other opportunities to delve into character, to go into stories from unusual angles, suddenly opened up. One of our rules is the camera never goes anywhere without a character. That means the camera never goes anywhere without a story. That meant that in episode one, instead of telling Jamie Miller’s story fully and properly from all perspectives, suddenly we had these other stories that had to just simmer. One of the things I’m most proud of in the show, and which I think Ashley does so beautifully, is that Bascombe’s story is quite unusual in terms of the angle we get on him as a character and the way we spend time with him. Ashley always says of Bascombe that he wasn’t playing a cop, he was playing a dad. I love that he feels that. I love that the show created the opportunity for that through its unconventional being.
I wanted to ask about that in terms of structure and just general construction of the series. It’s a four-part miniseries. I wanted to ask if you had envisioned it in those four parts to start or if you had adapted along the way. One thing that really caught my attention is I didn’t know what the story was about going in. I was very blind to it. For most of episode one, I’m thinking this is going to be an investigation of guilt. Then I realized it is absolutely not that, it is an investigation of why, not guilt. Structurally, I wanted to ask how you wanted to frame that in the whole of the series?
Jack: This was something that Stephen and I talked about right at the beginning which is that this is a why-done-it, not a whodunit. As soon as we worked that out, the episodes fell from that point on. We needed to see inside the school because we needed to understand the education system. We needed to see inside Jamie’s brain, so we needed to spend time with someone delving into Jamie’s brain. We needed to spend time with the parents and understand them in a way we wouldn’t necessarily get in a normal whodunit. Once we worked that out, we started playing around with what the story could be in each episode. Some discoveries came late. With episode two, we were still working on it right up to shoot week, changing things about the story. With episode four, we decided early it was going to be about Eddie having his van vandalized and going to a hardware shop, and that never changed. It was always that story. I love that about the show, that we were able to go to those places. It was a gift of the one-shot.
That’s really cool to hear. I think something else that really piqued my curiosity is that this is fiction, but it is very much mirrored in real-life issues, issues plaguing society across many borders. I’m curious to hear from you as a writer how you wanted to reflect potential realities that are major issues in society, but not operate in the documentary realm. There are actual events happening here, touch points that mirror reality, names mentioned that are real figures in this space. I’m curious how you navigated that threshold.
Jack: We mentioned Andrew Tate, but actually only the adults mention Andrew Tate because for the adults he is shorthand into something. For the kids, the experience of Andrew Tate is completely different, and Jamie, I don’t think, would take him that seriously. The figures Jamie is interested in are much lower down that tree, people that get 5,000 or 6,000 hits on their video rather than the hundreds of thousands Tate gets. In terms of what we were trying to do, this started from us noticing there was a problem of violence, teenage violence from boys to girls, that was growing. We wanted to work out why that was happening. That was Stephen’s initial question, and the more we looked into it, the more important it seemed to become. Our starting point was to pose a question about it. We didn’t necessarily have loads of answers. We wanted to pose a really well-researched question that said, here’s where we think the problem is, and now as a society we need to look into it. The more the show has gone on and the more research I’ve done, the more important I think that question is. There is a generation of kids as a result of COVID who have grown very attached to their technology, and the technology has found a way to sink its claws into them. Now they’re struggling to emerge from that. There’s a brilliant documentary Social Studies — I don’t know whether you’ve seen it, it’s on Disney Plus in the UK — that looks at kids and their phones. It’s really troubling what that’s doing to a generation. Particularly for boys, the message being sent is about how they should look, how they should behave, and it carries a troubling message about how they should feel about women. We need to help them. If we can provoke conversations on the sofa, in classrooms, at governmental level, that will cause them to talk to experts — not us, but experts — about how we handle this, then we’re pleased to have done that little bit of a job.
You talk about how much research went into this and how well-researched the questions were that you were trying to pose, framing the ideology and mentality of Jamie. What was it like in turn seeing Owen Cooper bring it to life in the way that he does?
Jack: Without doubt, one of, if not the most, thrilling experiences of my life. We started with episode three first. It was Phil, me, Matt Lewis our brilliant cinematographer, and a couple of others in a room with Erin Doherty facing off against Owen. He arrived knowing all his lines, brilliantly prepared. He was immediately a great actor, but through the week he let his Jamie come out. Owen is not Jamie. He is the nicest, sweetest boy in the world with beautiful parents, and I love spending time with him. But he let his Jamie come out, and on that Friday, the final performance with Erin, Phil and I turned to each other at the end and just went, we’ve got something here. It was really interesting because there was also the choreography of the shots happening at the same time between Matt and them. I was watching Matt spend eight or ten lines of dialogue on one face rather than swapping between faces. The one-shot forces you to look at a situation in a completely different way. Watching these actors rise to meet it and take control was beautiful. Craig Mazin, who I love and who’s a mate of mine, said on Scriptnotes that he felt the one-shot was the director’s medium. I totally disagree. I think it’s the writer’s medium, the director’s medium, the cinematographer’s medium, and most importantly the actor’s medium. Watching those actors own it was incredible. Actors playing smaller roles too — because everyone had to be there, there was no such thing as a day player. No one was just coming in for three lines of dialogue. Everyone was coming in and making this show together, raising their game time after time. You’re watching people who were doing the fingerprints with Jamie turn in beautiful performances with so much thought put into it because they built those characters themselves, and Phil gave them the string to take control. That meant it was such a special process to be part of, with Owen this bright shining diamond in the center.
Very much got chills when you described that magic moment where you looked at each other and said we’ve got something.
Jack: It was incredible because we didn’t expect it. We hoped something wonderful would happen, that we’d have someone who could lead us and do a really good job of Jamie. What we didn’t expect was someone who would disappear into the role like Owen did. He disappeared, and that’s why he’s getting all the awards, the wonderful praise, the wonderful parts now. It’s only right. He is one in a billion. When Stephen, the actor I think more of than anyone else in the world, says that’s a future De Niro, I think he’s absolutely right. He is a future De Niro, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.
That’s wonderful. Jack, just to close out, there’s been a lot of conversation in response to this show about raising awareness of media consumption by young people, maybe even limiting accessibility of these platforms. What do you hope is a wider impact or outcome in conversation with this series?
Jack: The first thing is that we talk to our kids. All of us — teachers, parents, everyone — just talk to our kids and try to make sure they’re safe with the conversations they’re having online. The second thing is that we think about what the technology is doing and whether there are ways to limit it. I’m really excited about what they’re doing in Australia, raising the social media age of consent, because I don’t see the benefit of putting kids on social media. I don’t see the good it does them. I’ve been part of conversations since the show aired with various groups. You hear about universities saying attention spans have dropped. You hear about schools saying female teachers are being abused. The worst conversation I had was with a young girl, 15 years old, who said, “I haven’t spoken in class for three years. I don’t speak in class because if I’m right, they make my life a nightmare. If I’m wrong, they make my life a nightmare.” We need to find a way to make the world better. I don’t see why thinking about how to limit the technology wouldn’t be a good aim for us all right now.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Jack, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate hearing more about this remarkable series. Again, huge congratulations on the acclaim and outcome from the series. I can’t wait to hear more from you in the future, see more of you, and continue to follow what you do next.
Jack: Thank you very much. It was such a special thing to be part of, so thank you for talking to me about it.
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