Strangers turning up at your house, a vehicle vandalised, violent commentary online, eyes tracking you as you shop – the last episode of Adolescence chillingly shows the modern consequences of sudden public attention.
But the creators of the Netflix show – already seeming certain to sweep the prizes in next year’s TV awards – have, in an upsetting case of life imitating drama, experienced something of this attention (although without, we hope, the criminal elements).
Along with star Stephen Graham, Jack Thorne co-wrote this extraordinary four-parter about the impact on the Miller family of 13-year-old Jamie stabbing to death a classmate, apparently under the influence of misogynist “incel” rhetoric imbibed online.
Thorne reports a digital backlash, telling GQ: “I went on Channel 4 News, and I talked about what I’d seen, and where I’d been, and why we were telling this story, and the comment stream afterwards was all about how I looked. It was all about my oestrogen levels, and my testosterone levels, and who I was as a man.”
Others involved in Adolescence have spoken privately about their alarm at the level of comment and attention as they go about their lives in public. In Los Angeles and New York – creative cultures more experienced in the toxic possibilities of publicity – actors in hit shows or films have bodyguards and gated mansions. But the cast of Adolescence may plausibly be seen on a bus or in a shop; the younger performers have to go to school.
Such excessive receptions to drama are becoming more common. This intensity of attention has happened three times in the last 15 months: with Mr Bates vs the Post Office (shown on ITV in January 2024), Baby Reindeer (on Netflix last April) and now Adolescence (released by Netflix on 13 March this year).
In the case of the drama about the false prosecutions of post office operators for fraud, some cast members were relieved to be filming other shows abroad after it aired, as colleagues texted accounts of being mobbed by the public while shopping or travelling. While this attention was friendly and supportive of the drama’s whistleblowing on corporate cruelty, that distinction may not always be reassuring to those on the receiving end.
Richard Gadd’s TV adaptation of his solo stage show, Baby Reindeer, started a loud conversation because of media and social media attempts to identify the real-life models of a stalker and a rapist in the fictionalised story. This led to a man complaining to the police of false identification and a woman telling Piers Morgan on TV that the stalking storyline was based on her. Last year, a US judge threw out the woman’s claims against Netflix for punitive damages due to negligence but allowed a case for defamation to continue.
That Adolescence seems to represent a further rise in public scrutiny is unsurprising, given its subject matter of the violently sexist, digital radicalisation of young men. Whereas we cared about post office operators and were gripped by comedian Gadd’s distressing personal life, every parent, teacher and student is more intensely invested in the story of a pubescent child-killer.
When the Baby Reindeer controversy happened, the dramatist Russell T Davies suggested in an interview with the Times that such a crisis would not have occurred at the BBC, which would have been “much stricter” with editorial checks. While there is no proof that Netflix’s processes failed in regard to Gadd’s drama, Davies’s comment reflected a feeling in British TV that streamer shows can take advantage of being outside the regulatory system led by Ofcom.
However, perhaps the greater problem for the corporation is that the three recent drama hits – Adolescence, Baby Reindeer and Mr Bates – were all produced by other broadcasters. That may be one reason why its chief content officer, Charlotte Moore, recently announced that she is leaving the BBC to become an independent drama producer.
In the case of Adolescence, Netflix and the production company (Brad Pitt’s Plan B) had two separate duties of care. The first was during shooting, and applied especially to the 15-year-old Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie, to protect him while repeatedly rehearsing and performing traumatic material. By all available accounts, such support was impeccably dispensed on set.
The second obligation of producers, though, is post-transmission. And here there might be questions. Everyone in the media wants a piece of a hit, but I have been surprised by the level of publicity commitments carried out by Cooper – given his age and this being his first role – and Thorne, whose charmingly unguarded personality can make him vulnerable to gotcha interviewing. That, though, is not only a matter for Netflix and Plan B; the media should also think about who they interview and how, and the framing of the coverage.
The biggest lesson, though, is that we tend to think of the arts as soft and safe, a haven from the heavy issues of news and tribalisms of sport. But because fiction often interrogates events and beliefs, culture is on the frontline of ideological tensions. Fiction is dangerous.
So Salman Rushdie is half-blinded and otherwise mutilated for his defence of free writing and speech. Audiences at last year’s open-air staging of Fiddler on the Roof in Regent’s Park walked though heightened security apparently deemed necessary for a Jewish show with Jewish actors. A theatre producer recently told me about having quietly dropped a planned production of a play about neo-Nazis because of security advice – that the theatre would not be safe for audiences and performers. And actors in a TV show must plead to be left alone.
From now on, producers will have to think hard about how to protect creative teams from the device and real-life attention that Adolescence, among other things, so brilliantly dramatised.
Especially with Netflix shows – which have a coordinated global drop that can make the vulnerability of those involved universal – recognisable creatives in standout series should probably go to a metaphorical or actual safe house when transmission begins. (Again, this is complicated with streamers by the period of weeks or months in which a show may be first seen.) If the subject matter is controversial, the producers should probably strongly recommend that those involved neither post on nor read social media, especially if young or vulnerable.
Great drama reflects society, but Adolescence has found a terrifying reflection staring back at it.
