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Netflix’s Adolescence has been a rare phenomenon, from a couple of different directions. For one thing, Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne’s four-part drama, about a young boy accused of brutally murdering a classmate, has simply caught incredibly strong reviews for its sober, often devastating depiction of the processes (both official, and otherwise) surrounding this kind of tragedy. (To say nothing of landmark performances from Graham, Owen Cooper, Erin Doherty, and the rest of its various stars.) It has also, from a strictly business point of view, been ridiculously successful for the streamer, topping streaming charts around the planet for weeks surrounding its release.
Which has kicked the show, inevitably, into that old tug of war between art and commerce, on account of TV executives tending to really like it when big hit shows find ways to make more of themselves, even if that doesn’t necessarily gel with what made the original offering so good. Graham got into this topic a bit in a recent conversation with Variety, and makes it clear that he’s pretty sure a lightning strike like the international success of a deliberately small-scale British crime/family drama isn’t something you can just summon up at will. “That’s once in a lifetime. We tapped straight into the zeitgeist. You’ve just had something that’s gone everywhere. I mean, No. 1 in Brazil? No.1 in Saudi Arabia?”
That being said, Graham did acknowledge a desire to tell more stories like this, albeit ones that probably won’t touch on the lives of Jamie Miller and the people surrounding him again. ““If we were to go again, would I like it to go again? With a different story completely? Yes.” He sounds much less interested in revisiting season one’s events; when asked about making a version of the show focused on the victim, Graham was straightforward in his analysis: “If we were a conventional drama, you would look at it from Katie’s perspective and we’d see the aftermath of Katie’s family. But I felt like we’d have seen that. We’ve seen that many a time. We haven’t really seen this side.”
So, yeah: Adolescence season two could happen. Just don’t expect to see Eddie or Jamie Miller at the heart of it again.
