“It’s Changed The Whole Way I Write”: Adolescence’s Jack Thorne on Immersive Drama and Ambiguity

In real life, crime stories seldom have tidy endings. The Netflix limited series Adolescence understands this.

Over four episodes, it unpacks the arrest and aftermath of a teenage boy accused of killing a girl classmate. Yet instead of focusing on a certain point of view or embracing an omniscient one, Adolescence shoots each episode as a continuous take, the camera attaching itself to different people as they move through scenes.

As writers and creators, Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham put it: “If we were leaving one room to go into another, the camera had to have a pal to go with it.”

In the opening moments, we meet a detective and his partner on a suburban street, then roll with them through the neighborhood. Officers ram through the front door of a modest house, where we glide up the stairs, past confused and frantic parents, then burst into a bedroom where a cop says he’s found the suspect: thirteen-year-old Jamie Miller (newcomer Owen Cooper).

While Netflix has posted behind-the-scenes stories about the filming, the construct proves more than just a gimmick. It creates an engrossing ambiguity, a propulsive quest for understanding that viewers and the characters share.

“Adolescence was written in a manner so the audience cannot look away, nor should it,” said RogerEbert.com. “This is a second-by-second examination of human psychology, the anguish of parenthood, and the failures of all the systems that, ostensibly, should help and protect teenagers.”

For Thorne, a Tony award-winning playwright and a multiple BAFTA writer for dramas such as 2017’s National Treasure, about a comedian (Robbie Coltrane) accused of past sexual abuse, writing Adolescence has been invigorating.

“I think that TV writing—and I include myself in this—has become slightly predictable in its rhythm … and shows that challenge that rhythm are the shows that audiences are hungry for,” he said. “With Adolescence, because of the amazing people that worked on that show, we got some of those rhythms right. And now I’m trying to work out how to do that with different people on different projects. It’s proving endlessly fascinating, to be honest.”

Nominated for thirteen Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, Adolescence has earned accolades for its cinematography, performances, and direction by Philip Barantini (Boiling Point). It set viewing records and holds a 98% “fresh” rating from RottenTomatoes.com, with critics praising its “spellbinding exploration” of toxic online culture, particularly the hostility toward women that Jamie absorbs.

Thorne (Toxic Town) and Graham (A Thousand Blows) have worked together for roughly twenty years. Adolescence came about after Graham, who plays Jamie’s father, Eddie, saw two separate news reports in the United Kingdom about young boys stabbing young girls to death. “It really hurt my heart,” Graham told the BBC.

Both men are fathers of sons. “A lot of the show was Stephen and I talking about our masculinity, our relationship with rage and the difficult places we've been and the things we’ve felt,” Thorne said. “And a lot of it was about how you parent and how you help your kid, and what you miss.”

He remembered a conversation with a friend whose child had been caught bullying someone else. “That always stuck with me. They were just so upset that they hadn’t been able to be that moral guardian,” he said. “Being a parent is a science experiment, isn’t it? You’re constantly trying to work out what the appropriate thing is to do with some of the stuff that your parents taught you and … some of the stuff your parents didn’t do, and you’re always filling holes.”

Their first crucial decision in plotting the show was that Jamie was guilty at the end of Episode One.

“I think it was Stephen’s idea, to give him full credit,” Thorne said. “That changes the whole structure of a show like this. You know that you’re not doing a whodunit. You’re doing a ‘why done it.’ And then it was a question of, OK, we need to deal with the spheres of blame as to who might be responsible for what Jamie did. There’s Jamie himself, of course, the school system, the parents, and then things that he might have consumed, which includes friendship and the social media sphere. But all these different things needed aspects of discovery, and so that was how the series was structured. We tried desperately to give as much air in the right places as we could.”

Finding Jamie’s voice wasn’t that difficult for Thorne, a screenwriter on the series His Dark Materials and the Enola Holmes films. He read and watched a lot, spoke to teens, and remembered his youth. “I’m an autistic kid that didn’t necessarily work out how to fit in, so I spent my entire teenage years watching people rather than really communicating with anyone, and that seems to have stayed somewhere locked in my gut,” he said.

Jamie’s arrest causes not only his parents to question themselves but the investigator, Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters), to wonder about spending more time with his own son (Amari Bacchus). Bascombe learns Jamie stabbed Katie (Emilia Holliday), his classmate, after she rejected his advances, although the boy at first doesn’t admit or absorb what he’s done.

Writing each episode as a continuous shot was “incredibly difficult” because it forced Thorne to limit each character’s perspective and knowledge.

“I’m used to telling the whole story,” he said. “But as soon as I worked out that it was about the incomplete rather than the complete, there was great freedom. Then it became: Where does the story go? What are the essential elements? And that was a really fascinating thing, because it didn’t work in the way that I expected it to. How do you tell a story about grief? How do you tell a story about responsibility? Those answers weren’t found in the ways that I normally work, and it’s changed the whole way I write.”

That said, he understands the criticism from some viewers who wanted to know more about Katie. “There are lots of clues as to who she is throughout, in particular from Jade [her friend, played by Fatima Bojang], but I understand that people were hungry to see more of her and to understand what a loss she was to the world.”

While in retrospect, he might have given more space to express that, “I also think if we’d started to go that way, that hyper focus on who and why Jamie exists would have been lost,” he said. “We had to embrace the partial. If we tried to tell the whole, it wouldn’t have worked.”

Katie’s presence does come through in creative ways. For instance, Holliday sings on the soundtrack at the end of Episode Three, where Jamie speaks with a court-ordered psychiatrist (Erin Doherty), Thorne said. (Deadline has posted the script of that episode here.)

While a continuous shot doesn’t suit every story, Thorne encouraged other writers to play with shifting and limited perspectives. The practice of hitting a turning point at fifteen minutes or writing around commercial breaks doesn’t quite work in streaming, where those pauses might not be there, he said.

“I think we can zig rather than zag, but by doing that, ask yourself the question: What does an audience need to know, rather than what an audience wants to know? An audience doesn’t always know what it wants. That is a really, really complicated question, and one that I don’t have the answer to, but one that I’m engaged on a journey with.”

He loves films like Parasite and shows like WandaVision, The Pitt, Dying for Sex, and Say Nothing that “hit story in unexpected places.”

“Steve and I wanted to do with the show, above all, is provoke a question, so that when people are on their sofas afterwards, they’re talking about it rather than just kind of going, ‘OK. That was another evening past, and I enjoyed the pizza,’” he said. “I think that the discontent as a viewer is sometimes quite a good thing. … There’s something nice about provoking a discussion.”

Adolescence is streaming on Netflix.