Impossible

Welcome to It’s a Hit! In this series, IndieWire speaks to creators and showrunners behind a few of our favorite television programs about the moment they realized their show was breaking big.

So many things can go wrong on any given project. When they go right, it means that the creators in charge have made a series of decisions that support the story they want to tell. Netflix’s “Adolescence” broke out way bigger than anyone ever expected, and wound up scoring 13 Primetime Emmy nominations.

Decision 1: Actor and producer Stephen Graham approached his frequent collaborator Jack Thorne (“The Virtues,” “Help”) to write the show.

Decision 2: Thorne convinced Graham to write it with him. “I’ve always thought that he was an actor that had a writer within him,” said Thorne to IndieWire over Zoom. “He is instinctively a storyteller. And so I wanted to find a way to harness that side of his brain and use it. He’s nervous about writing, he’s dyslexic, he doesn’t see himself as a writer, but I thought we could find a way to work together that would allow that side of his brain to flower.”

They met on Zooms; as Graham and Thorne talked things through, Thorne finalized dialogue and typed the script into the computer.

Decision 3: They wrote the show to be shot in four episodes as single long takes. “I want this to be about knife crimes,” Graham told Thorne, “and I want this to be in a single take and four episodes.” During the writing process, Thorne realized that “the single take was changing the way I write. I could see the joy of the incomplete. Where, conventionally, I would tell a story was not possible. Writing this show I realized the damage of that rhythm. This kicked me halfway across the road, and I was seeing traffic come towards me. And Stephen was an army captain, he’s ruthless. It’s done with love, and it’s done with care.”

Decision 4: With a rapidly approaching window to shoot the show, Graham and Thorne did something risky. All they had written was Episode 1. “I didn’t want to lose that window, and I didn’t want the project to die,” said Thorne. “Let’s write episodes 2 and 3 on spec and and thankfully, it paid off for us.”

Decision 5: Amazon, the original home of the series, did not want to make the show they wanted to make. So they walked away. “We just didn’t suit what they wanted to do,” said Thorne.

Decision 6: This allowed the two creators to go to Netflix UK. Graham had starred in the Netflix political series “Bodies.” They met with Netflix in January 2024 and were shooting by the summer. “Adolescence” launched production in July 2024 with director Phil Barantini and cinematographer Matthew Lewis, who had both shot the one-take drama “Boiling Point” with Graham. “They knew how to do it,” said Thorne. “The difference was that was a single room, and we weren’t doing single rooms. We were throwing cameras out of trucks. One of my jobs was to write the impossible and let these technically brilliant people work out ways to solve it, because it is always in the impossible that the interesting things happen.”

Decision 7: They fixed Episode 3. The first episode to be filmed was the confrontation between the 13-year-old accused murderer Jamie (Owen Cooper) and his psychologist (Erin Doherty). But Netflix had notes. “We had rehearsal week, tech week, and shoot week,” said Thorne. “Particularly Thursday of tech week, there will be a lot of people around watching the take, because that would be a dress rehearsal for where we were going to go with it. And at that point, any problems with the script would be apparent, and we’d have to get the spanners and the screwdrivers out and fix it, because there was no edit. The script wasn’t a document which then would be taken into filming, which then would be taken into the edit. The script was the story. On Episode 3, Anne Mensah, our Netflix exec, felt like we were taking way too long to get into the room. We slashed the script, and that still felt too ponderous. And so we ended up with [the psychologist] being late. And she was then traveling through the center at triple speed. It was one of those golden processes that happened so rarely, where it felt like everyone wanted to be on the same team.”

Decision 8: Netflix got behind it. The show was screened for content chief Bela Bajaria, who showed it to Co-CEO Ted Sarandos. “They were helping us position it so that it did have an international life,” said Thorne. “They were on it from the start, and they were passionate about it, and they felt like they had something that people will want to see. But that’s not to say it wasn’t a massive surprise. Because we thought we’d made a little show that might have some international interest, but we didn’t think it would do what it did, no one would ever dare. It did well in countries that I wouldn’t expect to be interested in the story of a lad from Pontefract just outside of Doncaster. We weren’t trying to tell a story that would work in America. It was about knife crime, not gun crime. It was local, but when it is specific enough it does work internationally, if given the chance. And that’s not just true of ‘Adolescence,’ that’s true of a lot of stories.”

Once the show aired to raves, Thorne started getting messages from old school friends, people who aren’t in the business. “You became aware of how many people in different countries were watching it and having that response,” said Thorne. “It is partly down to the single shot, and people were interested in the technical prowess that Matt and Phil showed in making the show, and there is an element of the fear of ‘What’s going on with my teenager behind a closed door?’ But the main reason is there was something about the performances that was special. The actors weren’t being required to do Scene 13 from Episode 2, followed by Scene 16 from Episode 3, and then Scene 20 from Episode 6, because we only have the location for the single day. They were actually telling the story of an hour. And they were telling it on their faces.”

Next up: Thorne is working on Sam Mendes’ series of films about The Beatles. That’s all he can say. He also adapted William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” directed by Mark London and filmed with 42 boys off the coast of Malaysia.

All episodes of “Adolescence” are now streaming on Netflix.