Adolescence writer Jack Thorne: 'I was as angry as Jamie in lots of ways'

Adolescence is the most talked about new drama of 2025. Which is exactly how it should be. The four episodes of the new Netflix series, each shot in one continuous take, are not only technically dazzling but offer a vital new perspective on one of the most important issues of the moment.

The series, exploring how the corrupting and polluting influence of the manosphere on impressionable boys can lead to extreme acts of violence against girls, offers no easy answers. But it asks the right kind of difficult questions that cannot be ignored. And it is already topping the Netflix viewing charts all around the world.

“You’re the start of something if you write, aren’t you?” said Jack Thorne, when he called Big Issue before the series launched. “That is what you hope when you make work for the theatre or telly – that you’re the start of a conversation.”

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Adolescence not only demands to be talked about, but being talked about is almost its entire reason to exist. At Prime Minister’s Questions this week, Anneliese Midgley, MP for Knowsley in Liverpool (the constituency in which Stephen Graham was born and raised), referenced the series when asking Keir Starmer to back a campaign to tackle toxic masculinity. Starmer responded that he is watching the series with his teenage children. This really is a series that could change things, or at least bring about the conversations and difficult discussions that will lead to change.

Thorne is open about his emotional connection to the drama he writes. “I always think about me and my mum on the sofa. Because that’s such a memory of my childhood.” he says. So when considering what the outcomes or responses to Adolescence will be, he was conjuring up similar scenarios around the country.

“I imagine a lot of silence and a lot of worry,” he said. “But then, hopefully, the conversation that arises is one where you really start talking about what you’ve seen and what it is you are worried about. I’ve got an eight-year-old. I know all about those conversations where you’re going places you or they don’t want to go. But they can be so important. I don’t think I had enough of those with my parents.”

The shooting style and the subject matter make Adolescence about as intense, unrelenting and compelling as television gets.

“It started, as a lot of good things in my life have, with a call from Stephen Graham,” Thorne said.

“We have worked together for 20 years. And he said, I’ve been talking to Phil [Barantini] and we want to do something about knife crime. Four one-hours, four single shots. I was in. We started talking and talking and talking, and I said to Stephen, what if we wrote it together? Him putting a different hat on has been a beautiful part of the project. I also loved it as his friend, because talking to Stephen about characters and story is always lovely.”

The trio leading the show were determined to avoid cliché, easy answers or apportioning blame too neatly.

“Stephen’s big thing from the start was, ‘I don’t want this to be a show that blames the parents,’” explained Thorne.

“I don’t think the parents are absolved from blame in this show at all – we paint a very complicated picture of responsibility. But then we started talking about motive. Why Jamie might have done this.”

But how to go about building a picture of what might make a 13-year-old boy commit such a horrific act. This was the issue that initially stumped the writer. Moving the story from the general – let’s explore teenage knife crime – to why would young Jamie Miller, played, so incredibly impressively, by newcomer Owen Cooper who was just 14 when they filmed Adolescence, reach for a knife?

“Nothing felt true. It took us a long time to find the incel stuff. It came from Mariella Johnson, who works for me and reads all my scripts. I never hand in a first draft, I always hand in a Mariella draft – partly because I can’t spell and have no understanding of grammar, but also because she tests every turn and twist,” continued Thorne.

“I talk to Mariella five times every day. She does a lot of research for me. And she said, what about incels? I looked into it. Now we had a story to tell.

“I was a Jamie. I think I was as angry as Jamie in lots of ways. And I hope this is a moment where parents – because I don’t know how much kids will watch this – will start those difficult conversations. Or if it’s not parents, teachers in the classroom.”

When DI Luke Bascombe, played by Ashley Walters, is schooled by his teenage son Adam in the coded meanings in Instagram comments and the twisted, insidious logic promoted within the manosphere – including the central theory that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men and therefore some corrective needs to be made –  it is a chilling moment. Many older viewers and parents were as shocked as the police officer at the depth of meaning in the emojis and comments.

The language, the logic, the anger, the misogyny peddled at and among teenage boys is truly frightening. And it is everywhere.

“It’s not about Andrew Tate. The people that talk about Andrew Tate are adults,” explained Thorne.

“It’s about a kid that gets polluted because of a number of issues in his life. And because what he gets told online makes sense to him. We look at rage. Phil, Stephen and I are all very proud that we looked at our own rage. We looked at ourselves and tested ourselves, as we built these complicated characters.”

We wouldn’t normally ask this question – and wouldn’t dream of asking a woman the same. But Thorne can take a small moment of payback. So how has becoming a parent changed the way he writes?

“Absolutely. Because it has changed me. It’s never something I expected, is the honest answer. I thought I was going to be alone for the whole of my life and I was quite comfortable with that,” said Thorne.

“I was having a conversation with my extended family last night about friendship, which is not a concern of mine. Because I don’t worry about having friends. I do have some. But one of my closest friends I just saw for the first time in three years. I am just not built that way. And I thought I was going to care for people from afar my entire life.

“Then Rachel came along and surprised me. Then Elliot came along and further surprised me. And that process of emotional need from both sides is extraordinary and exciting. It’s impacted me hugely. I’m still computing it. I have never felt absorption like it. And I love it. And I find the responsibility very frightening. I’m sure all of that is reflected in my work.”

Thorne is one of the best in the business. His work often packs a powerful punch, from the teenage angst of Skins to collaborations with Shane Meadows on This Is England 86, 88 and 90 plus another heartwrenching Stephen Graham vehicle The Virtues, a trilogy of hard-hitting Channel 4 series National Treasure (starring Robbie Coltrane), Kiri and The Accident (both featuring Sarah Lancashire), furious Covid in care homes drama Help (starring Jodie Comer with Graham), the struggles of the Disabled Action Network in Then Barbara Met Alan and Netflix’s beautiful IVF origin story Joy, he’s never been shy of tackling heavy issues.

“It upset me when everyone said, hey, look what TV drama can do after Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Because some of us have been trying to do that with drama for years,” he says.

“If I meet people at a party and they ask what I have written, I always go: ‘If you have seen something depressing on Channel 4, chances are I wrote it’.” He may need to add Netflix to his response – with Adolescence following just weeks after Toxic Town explored the Corby toxic waste scandal and subsequent fight for justice on the same network.

Just don’t call him prolific. He is not delighted about his two recent shows, both tackling big issues, dropping within a fortnight of each other. Both shows also share a lot of the same DNA with a third big TV show, Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows (also produced by and starring Stephen Graham, co-starring Adolescence’s Erin Doherty and Hannah Walters, with an episode directed by Ashley Walters).

“I hate the fact that these shows are coming out together,” he says. “The question I struggle with is whether I’m damaging other people by taking their slots. And I also worry that people make judgments about the quality of it if there’s too much quantity – that’s why I don’t like the word prolific,” he says.

“But the way that I think about the important question of am I denying other people, is that I don’t think of TV as a zero-sum game. So I think of it as creating a space for others. If this genre works on Netflix – because social realism like this is new to them – then other writers can pour in and do a much better job than me. That’s the line that I stick to.

“It’s weird. I haven’t had anything on telly since Best Interest, which was almost two years ago. Now two shows that were a year apart in filming arrive within two weeks of each other.”

But Thorne knows TV is the best medium for these stories.

“That’s what drama can do. That’s why drama is best. The importance of telly is in the light we can shine on things. That attracts me as a viewer and as a storyteller,” he says.

“I’ve just finished watching Say Nothing – which is extraordinary. Suddenly the whole Good Friday Agreement is being shaped for me in a completely different way. That’s what good TV can do.

“TV is really important. I learned so much about the world I live in through television. I want to be good enough to have written an Our Friends In The North or a Boys From The Blackstuff because those are shows that meant most to me. So I’m going to keep trying to make them until I eventually do so or just die with a feeling of failure. Either is possible.”

This is not the end of his big year tackling big issues. Up next is The Hack, which digs into the scandalous recent history of phone hacking alongside the investigation into the unsolved murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan. With David Tennant as campaigning journalist Nick Davies and Toby Jones as former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, it’s going to cause a stir. But Thorne is not unduly worried about any response from the perpetrators of the phone hacking.

“I’m not especially frightened of Murdoch,” he says. “The thing that scares me most is journalists watching it and judging it and whether we got journalism right. I think the show is in praise of journalism. This is about extraordinary journalists who did very brave things to uncover the truth. So I hope we get that right.”

Beyond that, Thorne is writing a series called Liverpool. 

“It’s about Liverpool Football Club – so I’m right in the middle of Bill Shankly at the moment,” he said. “We’re trying to tell a portrait of the city and the club and the way Bill brought both together – it’s the story of this explosion of football and music that happened in Liverpool in the 1960s while the city was in a long-term industrial decline.”

Thorne is on a roll. He’s at the top of his game. And he plans to keep exploring big ideas, big issues, and provoking big conversations via the small screen.

“I might not get the opportunity to tell these stories again. I hope with Adolescence we’re telling a nuanced story about who we talk about when we talk about knife crime,” said Thorne. “What this kid looks like, talks like, who they are. We need to see it in the everyday, not think the headlines are about other people or part of another world. Because they are not.”

Adolescence is on Netflix.

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