'I read an article and it made me feel cold': Stephen Graham on the true story behind Netflix's Adolescence
Netflix's Adolescence is finally available to stream from today (Thursday 13 March), amid a lot of buzz about it being one of the best new TV shows in a long while, and certainly of 2025. No doubt many of us will be binge-watching it tonight or over the weekend (it's four episodes long, so you can plan your snacks and sofa time accordingly), and asking the same question: is this harrowing crime drama based on a true story?
Shot in an unflinching single shot (quite the techy feat for the cameraman), Adolescence tells the story of how a family’s world is blown up when 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper in his debut role) is arrested for the murder of a teenage girl who goes to his school. Stephen Graham plays Jamie’s father and ‘appropriate adult’, Eddie Miller; Ashley Walters stars as Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe; and The Crown's Erin Doherty is Briony Ariston, the razor-sharp clinical psychologist assigned to Jamie’s case.
While not inspired by any single real-life event, the cast and crew of Adolescence have spoken about the deeply unnerving context in which this harrowing limited series was born. Speaking at a special screening in London last night (Wednesday 12 March) hosted by anti-toxic-masculinity campaigner Ben Hurst, Graham said: 'I read an article in the paper about a young boy stabbing a young girl and it made me feel a bit cold. Then three or four months later, there was a piece on the news and, again, it was a young boy who had stabbed a young girl.
'These are young boys, not men. It really hurt my heart for many different reasons, predominantly as a father but also where we’re at in society for this to happen. And I knew who I wanted to write it, Jack [Thorne]. Jack is one of the finest writers, he writes the human condition so beautifully with such complexities.'
Both Thorne and Graham added that their hope is that Adolescence sparks important conversations within families that could help prevent future violence against women and girls. 'We don’t have the answers, we’re saying please begin the conversation,' said Graham, with Thorne adding: 'Like Stephen said, it takes a village to make a child, it takes a village to destroy a child. It’s not just the parents’ responsibility.'
Walters, too, said he felt sure that any parent watching this show will feel propelled to ask their children questions they perhaps haven't felt they needed to before. 'This story isn’t about who committed the crime. We can’t answer the question as to why he did it either but, we raise the conversation,' he said. 'There’s no parent that’s going to turn off their TV, after watching this show, and not go into their kids’ room and say “What’s happening with you?” and if we can achieve that, we’re going in the right direction.'
What stands out is how Adolescence doesn't offer easy answers for why Jamie did what he did – he comes from a happy, loving family with no darkness lurking behind closed doors.
'We could have made a drama about gangs and knife crime, or about a kid whose mother is an alcoholic or whose father is a violent abuser,' Stephen Graham told Netflix previously. 'Instead, we wanted you to look at this family and think, "My God. This could be happening to us!" And what’s happening here is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare.
'One of our aims was to ask, ‘What is happening to our young men these days, and what are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet, and from social media? And the pressures that come from all of those things are as difficult for kids here as they are the world over.'
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