Editor’s note: spoilers ahead for all four episodes of Adolescence
Jack Thorne has just stepped off a train when he picks up the phone to Deadline, the latest destination in a dizzying round of interviews about what could become the biggest hit of his career: Adolescence.
The writer was arriving back in London from Manchester, where he and Stephen Graham sat on BBC Breakfast’s famous red sofa to discuss their Netflix series in front of the British nation. For a man who always appears breathlessly busy with work, even Thorne seems a little dazed by the interest in Adolescence. “It’s been a really delicious and wonderful whirlwind,” he says.
Thorne and Adolescence director Philip Barantini first sat down with Deadline last month to tease the drama, which opens with 13-year-old Jamie Miller (played by the extraordinary newcomer Owen Cooper) being arrested by armed police on suspicion of murder. Over the course of four episodes, each of which is captured in one continuous shot, we learn about Miller’s meeting with the “manosphere” and the devastating impact his actions have on his family.
Now nearly a week after the premiere — in which time Adolescence has topped Netflix’s most-watched list in 71 countries around the world — we wanted to pose a few more burning questions to Thorne. The writer reflects on why Adolescence is the purest version of his writing on screen and what happened to Miller’s murder weapon. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
DEADLINE: You often say that your work sets out to ask questions rather than answer them. What was the big question Adolescence sought to pose?
THORNE: The big question was why is violence from young men or boys towards young women or girls going up? Why is this happening? Looking into it and trying to pose that question as fulsomely as possible, without providing easy answers, was the aim that Stephen [Graham] and I set out on years ago.
DEADLINE: Why has the series resonated so much with Netflix audiences?
THORNE: I hope what we’ve done is shine a light on an area which has been talked about but not looked at. This is an issue that everyone has been aware of, but discovering it through Jamie is something we’ve been set on capturing. That people are excited to watch and understand Jamie, and try to understand the issue through Jamie, is rewarding.
DEADLINE: Has Philip Barantini’s continuous shot method meant that the show has captured the imagination in a way that it might not have done had you shot in a more traditional way?
THORNE: I think that there is a real joy in the incomplete. There is a real joy in how partial this show was able to be. It was written in a really partial way, we couldn’t cover all corners. For instance, episode two has a whole question going through it, of where is the knife? That’s why DI Luke Bascombe [Ashley Walters] is there. We cannot answer that. We don’t answer that. I could have tried to fit it into dialog in episode three, but that would have felt inauthentic and wrong.
DEADLINE: There is no doubt that I was left wanting more, which I think is a good thing in many ways…
THORNE: The audience understands the rhythm that we’re in as dramatists. An audience has certain expectations as to what will happen when that has been embedded in the backs of their heads through watching drama as long as we all have. What this show can do through the one-shot format is challenge those expectations in a different way.
DEADLINE: So where is the murder weapon knife then, Jack?
THORNE: I’m not going to answer that question because if I did, then that would spoil it.
DEADLINE: But you have a working theory?
THORNE: I have an answer because Stephen and I worked everything out. But the point is that we didn’t have to answer it, and by not answering it, we create a question, and that question hangs on.
DEADLINE: It struck me that there is dissonance between the quality of Adolescence and Toxic Town, which you also wrote for Netflix this year, and the conversation that is going on in the UK industry at the moment about concerns over funding for British stories. Do you recognize that dissonance?
THORNE: I think it’s brilliant that Netflix are going to these places. I was aware, particularly with Toxic Town, we had to prove that social realism could work on the service and it had an audience. I am so grateful that we got an audience for it. I hope that causes the commissioning of other writers to tell other stories about our country.
Everyone who worked on the show, and I include the commissioners in this, comes from a public service background. Toby Bentley [Netflix’s UK series manager] script-edited National Treasure, produced Kiri, and executive produced Best Interests. He worked on Toxic Town and Adolescence with me. Mona Qureshi similarly joined from the BBC. Stephen and I have spent our lives making public service television, and then there’s the big [Netflix] boss Anne Mensah. We’re all a product of public service broadcasting and we make it because we believe in it. But Netflix is only part of the answer to the question of how we keep this stuff going.
If Channel 4 and the BBC are denied the opportunity to make these shows, that’s devastating. The problem of international finance and what that’s done is incredibly current and leading to a lot of my friends and emerging writers being denied the opportunity to tell stories. If they are denied the opportunity to tell those stories, then the whole culture starts to crumble, and shows like Adolescence and Toxic Town are no longer possible. Netflix making these shows is exciting, but it’s not everything.
I want to see the next Michaela Coel emerge. I want to see the next Jimmy McGovern emerge. They’re only going to emerge if Channel 4 and the BBC are given the muscle to make drama. I do think that requires government help and us rethinking ourselves as an industry.
DEADLINE: Are you seeing evidence of emerging writers being steered away from developing stories around certain subjects?
THORNE: Very much so. There is a certain type of show which is seen as being a show that people want to watch and when you have a policeman in your head saying, ‘There isn’t an audience for this, why don’t I write a crime show?,’ that’s when things start to go really wrong.
When I was growing up, we had a mad variety of different shows that were about all sorts of different facets of life. That doesn’t exist right now — we’re drowning in crime. I like watching crime shows, but if I’m a young writer and I’ve got stories I want to tell about my my mum, who’s a social worker, or the time that I did ice dancing for a year and fell in love with another lad. All that stuff is being wiped away by fears over what shows should be because we are so panicked about money and budgets. It’s just really damaging that sort of conservative ethos. When you’re in a recession, and we’re in a profound recession, those questions become louder. I fear for the next generation.
DEADLINE: That can’t be healthy for the industry, can it?
THORNE: Or the country. Television is a really powerful medium. You can still get people talking about one show. That’s what Mr Bates vs The Post Office proved, hopefully that’s what Adolescence proves. You only do only do that if you’re able to make daring television.
DEADLINE: There are a bunch of solutions that are being kicked around at the moment, none of which are going to happen quickly. Where do you sit, would you like tax breaks or a streamer levy?
THORNE: It’ll only work if it’s bits of this and bits of that. I think a levy could fund two sorts of shows: the shows that are impossible to make without it, and shows that are specifically about creating talent opportunities. I was given my spurs by Skins, which brought forward a huge amount of new talent and did it sort of effortlessly. I would say Skins would qualify for levy or tax break funding. Who then governs that? I don’t know. What I don’t think it is, is an opportunity for people like me to make more shows. It’s just got to be governed really carefully and thought about really carefully.
The thing would be to not exclude Netflix from that process. It’s not about going, ‘We’re going to tax you.’ It’s about going, ‘We would love you to contribute to a scheme that is keeping our television ecology going.’ It’s about fighting to build something together.
DEADLINE: Did you pitch Adolescence to anyone other than Netflix?
THORNE: Yes, we were developing it with Amazon and then that didn’t work out and then we took it to Netflix.
DEADLINE: You never spoke to a UK public service broadcaster?
THORNE: No, [the drama’s co-producer] Plan B had a deal with Amazon and started the whole conversation. Once we developed it, it would have been very hard to make it anywhere else, because of the way that it had been written. I don’t think it’d be impossible to make. It wasn’t a ridiculous budget, but it was still a very generous budget.
It required things that were very complicated to do. We had 15 days to shoot each episode, as compared to probably nine or 10 we’d have got on a conventional broadcaster. It would have been tough to do it nine or 10. We needed the one week of tech and rehearsal, one week of shooting.
DEADLINE: Would it have been prohibitively expensive for a UK broadcaster?
THORNE: At the moment, absolutely. We would have needed international finance to make it work, and with the market the way it is, that would have been very difficult to do.
DEADLINE: It shows that these distinctively British stories can be told on Netflix and resonate with a global audience…
THORNE: What I love in drama is the specific, that you can tell when a story is authentically anchored in something. I feel like that when I’m watching Squid Game and that’s what we aspire to with this show. If it works, it’s because people are feeling the authenticity of it. We worked really hard on that and Stephen was ruthless when we were working on the scripts.
DEADLINE: You’ve talked about having to constantly re-write the show during production. Were there any changes that surprised you and changed the course of the series?
THORNE: A huge difference for me in terms of what ended up on screen is the fact that there was no edit process. Normally you go through an edit process and there are choices to be made about what parts of the script get used. Generally what you’ve written ends up being pretty well represented.
In this, the script had to be absolutely thoroughly examined by everyone because we were solidifying a document that would be the final cut of the show. Everyone was involved in the development process and the actors had this week of rehearsal and we examined it with them and made some changes. It had to be this great big muscular thing that could stand up to punches from all sides. In many ways, it’s the closest representation of my writing I’ve ever seen, other than on stage.
The scene that we changed most frequently, in terms of finding exactly what we wanted to say, was the final scene between Chrissy [Christine Tremarco] and Stephen in the room as Amanda and Eddie are talking about how they felt about Jamie. We went through all sorts of iterations of that as we were finding exactly what we wanted to say. We just wanted to get that conversation right.
Chrissy and Stephen have known each other since they were teenagers. There’s that too, running through it that. They are the same age, they have seen the same things, they knew each other at the disco when they were 15 years old. That relationship is really beautiful.
DEADLINE: So come on then, did you get any notes from Plan B co-founder Brad Pitt?
THORNE: I didn’t get a note from Brad Pitt. I’m always early on a Zoom call and he’s always early on a Zoom call too. So we had 40 seconds where I just stared at this beautiful man and he just said: ‘Hi, I’m Brad.’ And I was just like, ‘Yeah, I know.’ And then other people joined.
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