Creative innovation,global engagement and public outcomes: The significance of Netflix’s Adolescence

Introduction

Adolescence, a limited serial created for Netflix and produced in the UK, was one of the most widely watched TV shows of 2025. Set in Northern England, it tells the confronting story of a 13-year-old schoolboy accused of murder. In examining the motivations for this crime, Adolescence foregrounds social media’s contribution to what happened, pointing specifically to the dangers of exposure to young teenagers, through social media, of misogynist ideology and to the inability of today’s parents to protect their children from consequent psychological harm. Viewed by an estimated 144.8 million worldwide subscribers within 5 months of its release date (Broadcast, 18 July 2025a), the four-episode drama is among the most watched English-language dramas in the history of Netflix (Lee, 2025). Adolescence also attracted record audiences within the UK, becoming the first SVoD-originated show to outrate UK broadcast offerings, and amassing an estimated 12.2 million British viewers during its debut month of March 2025 (Ofcom, 2025: 39).

The above outcomes testify to the unusual level of attention that Adolescence received both in the UK and around the world. Despite its commissioning outside the UK broadcast sector, it aligns with the UK’s prestigious tradition of public sphere drama, the leading examples of which – including the BBC’s Cathy Come Home (1966), Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), and ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office (2024) – have commanded both national and international attention and inspired social change. But whereas the above three TV dramas were created for UK PSBs, and as such, were universally available to the British public, Adolescence was commissioned for Netflix, the world’s largest SVoD provider, whose originals are available only to its subscribers. This has meant that Adolescence, by virtue of its commissioning for Netflix, has functioned in a multinational rather than a domestic arena and has succeeded spectacularly despite the expected limitations on viewing numbers of a platform that viewers must pay to access.

This article explores Adolescence’s significance from related perspectives which fall into three main areas of inquiry and foreground the UK as the country from which Adolescence originated. The first, is the question of why Adolescence was commissioned for Netflix, a multinational SVoD service, rather than for one of the UK’s public service broadcasters (PSBs). What does Adolescence’s creation for Netflix infer about the state of UK-produced ‘high-end’ drama in the era of SVoDs? Second, as a drama conceived in response to legitimate concerns about knife crime perpetrated by teenage males in the UK, the article considers the creative genesis of Adolescence and asks what narrative and aesthetic strategies were important in distinguishing it. Third, is how Adolescence has managed to fulfil some of the historic public sphere functions of UK TV drama, yet in a near-global rather than a domestic arena. What outcomes are indicative of a public sphere impact for Adolescence both within and beyond the UK?

UK-produced high-end drama in the era of SVoDs

TV drama, a genre that has been nurtured and mentored by national broadcasters since the inception of the television medium, remains the most expensive and risky form of programming to produce. There are some good reasons why this risk has never been higher than it is in today’s era of SVoDs. Focussing on the UK, this section of the article assesses the key institutional features of TV’s current multiplatform landscape that made Adolescence, as an ambitious, unflinching, and relatively expensive four-episode drama, attractive and viable for Netflix yet a more challenging commission for one of the UK’s PSBs.

The first feature is how much the penetration and popularity of SVoDs has altered the institutional contexts for UK drama commissioning and the economics that have made ambitious and expensive TV dramas harder for PSBs to fund and commission today. UK audiences are dispersed across a wider variety of media and an enlarged range of televisual platforms, with SVoDs, YouTube and social media all competing with broadcasters for audience attention, as data from the latest Media Nations report shows. This report notes that 67% of UK households have at least one of the most popular SVoD platforms (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+) in their homes (Ofcom, 2025: 31). Of these SVoDs, Netflix retains the highest penetration with a presence in 57% of UK homes. This dominance also means that Netflix’s content accounts for half of the UK’s SVoD viewing (Ofcom, 2025: 32). While the corelative for increased SVoD penetration and audience attention is decreased viewing of UK broadcast shows, younger adults (aged 16–34) are watching more SVoD content than older age-groups, with Netflix accounting for half of their 55 minutes of daily SVoD viewing in 2024 (Ofcom, 2025: 32).

Roberta Pearson (2021: 87) draws important contrasts between UK broadcasters and Netflix in terms of the range of programmes these have each provided, noting that the former ‘offer a wide variety of programming genres to a national community’, while the latter ‘offers high end dramas and other fictional content to global “taste communities” defined by cultural preferences rather than demographics or geography’. Pearson highlights these differences in acknowledgment of the institutional disadvantages they have created for broadcasters in their competition with SVoDs. The repercussions of these differences are demonstrated by recent Media Nations data about what genres have been pulling UK viewers from broadcast TV to SVoDs in the period 2022–24 (Ofcom, 2025: 33). The latest Media Nations report found that UK viewers are currently lured to broadcast TV especially by news, sports and documentaries (Ofcom, 2025: 33). However, increasing the challenges for today’s broadcast-commissioned dramas, this report shows that just four genres (drama, films, entertainment and children’s programming) accounted for 96% of UK audience switches from broadcasters to SVoDs in the years 2022–24, with drama motivating one-third of all switches (Ofcom, 2025: 33). Content-regulated UK broadcasters operate at a disadvantage in respect of these audience preferences. Content regulation requires a majority of UK broadcast shows to be locally produced rather than being acquired as finished shows from other markets. Additionally, whereas Netflix and other SVoDs can and do favour the programme forms that are most attractive to their subscribers, UK broadcasters must offer ‘a diversity of programme genres’ (Pearson, 2021: 88). While audience expectations for this diversity remain important to their commissioning decisions, UK broadcasters are also required by regulation to continue to provide a wide range of programme genres.

The second feature of TV’s SVoD era is the much higher budgets required to create today’s ‘high-end’ dramas, these involving unprecedented production costs which have further separated this area of drama from other television genres, including from the highest volume form of UK TV fiction, soap operas. The term ‘high-end’ acknowledges the presence of high production values, which, because of the extraordinary costs involved in creating it, means that high-end drama is increasingly distant from ‘ordinary television’ in Frances Bonner’s terms (2003). Higher budgets for TV drama provide their writing and production processes with resources that far exceed those of ‘ordinary’ television, one example of which is extra time for meticulous attention to visualisation, camerawork and mise-en-scène (Dunleavy, 2018: 4). In contrast with soap opera (which entails the use of multi-camera set-ups and studio shooting to reduce costs and production time), high-end drama requires a high proportion (40% or more) of location scenes per series, and a single-camera, more ‘cinematic’ approach to filming. Both qualities are important to what John Caldwell (1995: 88) terms ‘programme individuation’ which refers to the distinctive ‘look’ of a TV drama. In the last two decades, production costs of high-end drama (influenced by the pursuit of ‘cinematic’ aesthetics) have risen faster and more spectacularly than ever – with notable examples in Netflix’s multi-season flagships The Crown (2016–23) and Stranger Things (2016-25) – driven upward by the much higher production budgets of SVoD originals, a pattern that began in US ‘premium cable’ TV (Dunleavy, 2018: 37) but now operates in the context of on-demand delivery.

While the budgets for SVoD originals continue to rise, and as they do, exert upward pressures everywhere else on what high-end dramas cost to create, leading UK broadcasters already struggle to finance the ambitious dramas they would like to create. There is an example in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (BBC, 2024) which was difficult for the BBC to afford, a challenge only met through the decision of some of its leading creative personnel to reduce their fees (Kosminsky cited in PA Media, 25 January 2025). Whether ad-funded or publicly funded, UK broadcasters’ commissioning budgets are limited and declining in today’s fragmented audience market, this mitigated by the continuing pressure on broadcasters to commission a range of genres, to ensure a majority of local content, and meet a majority of their production costs from within their national market. In contrast, the revenues of leading SVoDs are increasing in line with their multinational penetration and rising subscriber numbers. By 2026, Netflix had amassed an estimated 325 million global subscribers, making it the largest and most profitable SVoD (Maglio, 2026). When Netflix commissions expensive original TV dramas it does so in the expectation that, at the very least, these can be made available to subscribers in a multitude of markets and, for those that do find multinational appeal, the production costs can be readily amortised to justify the initial investment.

Rising costs for high-end drama are hitting broadcasters particularly hard in the context of other characteristics of the SVoD era. One is the continuing decline of linear viewing numbers, an international trend that has occurred at a faster rate in smaller national markets, yet whose impacts are now spreading to medium-sized markets like the UK. In 2024, for the first time, the UK’s total broadcast video-on-demand (BVoD) viewing was higher than for live (or linear) television and BVoD viewing is increasing its lead over linear viewing year on year (Ofcom, 2025: 24). While there is no immediate threat to the survival of linear TV in the UK, Channel 4 plans to operate fully digitally by 2030 (News Release, Channel 4, 29 January 2024) and become the first UK broadcaster to do so. The decline of linear viewing in the UK has particular significance for decisions to commission new high-end dramas for what were once described as ‘post-watershed’ time slots, as moments in the daily schedule for which high-end TV drama (especially that with adult content or themes) was regularly commissioned. Connecting the UK’s declining 9 pm audiences with the ascent of Netflix, Michael Savage (2025) observes that ‘the arrival of streaming services such as Netflix have dramatically pulled audiences away from traditional broadcast television and divided audiences. Executives regard the “overnights” – instant ratings indicating how many people watched a show as it was broadcast – as increasingly irrelevant’. While these changes need not correlate with reduced spending on original drama by UK broadcasters, they do help to explain the constraints on this investment.

A third feature of the context that has favoured the commissioning of Adolescence by Netflix rather than by one of the PSBs, is what Gillian Doyle et al. (2021: 171) term the ‘internationalisation’ of drama; a development that impacts the high-end of the production spectrum first because its costs are increasingly difficult for broadcasters, including UK broadcasters, to finance alone. It means that international appeal is an early consideration in the development and financing of new high-end dramas. As Doyle et al. (2021: 171–172) explain, ‘the need for SVoDs to establish their reputations and build up subscriber levels across multiple territories has resulted in highly strategic investment both in locally specific and in wider “big statement” content that has a strong appeal globally’. While ‘internationalisation’ impacts the majority of high-end dramas that are still exported as finished programmes, one answer to this internationalisation has been increased transnational coproduction. Recognising the importance of SVoD drama commissioning to this, I identify two main approaches to it in TV’s current era; ‘cross-platform coproduction’ and ‘direct commissioning’ (Dunleavy, 2020). What makes this coproduction transnational is that the multinational SVoDs most involved in it (specifically Netflix, HBO Max, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime Video) are US-owned.

‘Cross-platform coproduction’ highlights the co-financing and collaboration some dramas involve between SVoDs and broadcasters. This approach is exemplified by two other UK-produced dramas of comparable scale and duration to Adolescence: the five-episode anthology series Small Axe (2020) which paired BBC with Amazon Prime Video, and the five-episode serial It’s a Sin (2021) which paired Channel 4 with HBO Max. Adolescence, which Netflix commissioned from the UK’s Warp Films, Plan B Entertainment, It's All Made Up Productions, Matriarch Productions, and One Shoe Films exemplifies ‘direct commissioning’, which entails the greenlighting and financing of a new show by a single, usually multinational SVoD, operating in partnership with one or more production companies within a given market. In terms of its commissioning of original shows and regardless of the national market involved, Netflix prefers to have outright ownership of the completed productions and thus opts for ‘direct commissions’ over ‘cross-platform’ approaches to transnational coproduction. Direct commissioning differs radically from older approaches to international coproduction because it bypasses the necessity for a national broadcaster to be involved. It is partly because of this that direct commissioning can bring a drama to the screen far more quickly than cross-platform coproductions are able to; with Small Axe and It's a Sin both taking several years to obtain a broadcast greenlight and enter production (see Dunleavy, 2023 and 2024). While It’s a Sin and Small Axe both told historical stories, the amount of time elapsing between the commissioning and release of a given show becomes most crucial for TV dramas whose narrative seeks to engage with current social problems and stimulate conversation in an effort to initiate change. This time sensitivity was characteristic of Adolescence.

Adolescence’s creative genesis and commissioning

Adolescence was co-created by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, the former developing the initial idea for the drama and the latter researching and writing the episodes; a creative collaboration that Graham jokingly characterises as akin to ‘a combined Frankenstein [whereby] I bring him body parts – a torso, a head, some legs, a few hands – and he miraculously injects a spirit’ (Heritage, 2025). Yet the central creative team was a talented trio, rather than a duo, given the vital contributions of Adolescence’s co-executive producer and director, Philip Barantini. Working in partnership with Graham on UK feature film, Boiling Point (2021), which follows one night in a high-end restaurant, Barantini successfully applied a ‘one-shot’ (or single take) approach to this film, aiming to enhance a sense of the intense pace and pressure of this working environment. While the one-shot approach entails additional challenges for everyone on set, as will be detailed later, Barantini points to its value and purpose in Adolescence, as ‘a format that forces an audience to pay attention, not to shy away and take their eyes off the screen’ (Barantini cited in Broadcast, 7 March 2025b). This one-shot approach is a notable distinction for Adolescence and was especially difficult given its use of multiple locations, whereas Boiling Point was entirely filmed in a large restaurant kitchen. Yet, what is most unusual about the genesis of Adolescence is that the one-shot aesthetic that Barantini perfected on Boiling Point, rather than being chosen after the Adolescence concept and story were developed, was in place first.

The process began when Steven Graham found himself horrified by a series of violent crimes in the UK being committed against teenage girls by teenage boys. As executive producer (with Philip Barantini) and co-creator (with Jack Thorne), Graham wanted to depict the most serious form of violence committed by teenage boys in the UK: the murder of a teenage girl. By the time Thorne was invited to research the story and write the scripts, there were some key parameters for the kind of drama this would be. Using a one-shot aesthetic to help ensure intense audience engagement, Adolescence would ‘look into the eye of male rage’ (Thorne cited in Hogan, 2025) by telling a story about the murder of a teenage high-school student, Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday) by 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a classmate. Seeking to stimulate a domestic conversation about the extreme violence being committed by teenage boys, this drama would also replace the conventional ‘whodunit’ tendency of murder-investigation dramas by identifying the killer early in the narrative so as to then focus on why such a crime was committed.

As the narrative evolved into a four-episode serial, key elements of Adolescence’s story were decided upon prior to Thorne’s research and scriptwriting. One was Graham’s conviction that this drama would not blame the fictional parents so as to place moral emphasis on the psychological state of the teenage killer. Another was the decision to build Adolescence around a 13-year-old boy rather than an older teenager. A third was to probe the question of how such a young teenager could find himself feeling the degree of rage that could prompt him to murder. Thorne explains the conceptual process in these terms:

We did need more than we had [in addition to the above elements] and someone that worked with me, Mariella Johnson, said I think you should look at incel culture… I spent a long time in a lot of very strange places, looking at a lot of very strange content. And the thing that surprised me was how attractive it was… [If] I was a 13 year old boy and I was told there’s a reason why you feel unattractive… why you feel isolated… why you’re not sure how to talk in certain situations… it’s because the world is against you… [B]ecause 80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men, this world is female-dominated, and you need to find ways to reset the balance. The more of these videos I watched, the more convincing I found it. That’s when I found out how we could write Jamie (Thorne interview, This Morning, YouTube, 25 March 2025).

Hesthi Herusatoto (2025) investigates the ideologies of the ‘manosphere’ and ‘incel culture’ as invoked in Adolescence. ‘The manosphere’, she explains, ‘is a cluster of websites, blogs, online forums, and message boards promoting misogyny, masculinity, rejection [of] feminism, and hateful ideas’ (Herusatoto, 2025: 465). ‘Incel culture’, she suggests, has evolved in the context of an expanded online manosphere. Whereas its literal meaning, ‘involuntary celibate’, refers to ‘people who define themselves by their inability to have sexual intercourse and romantic relationships’ (Preston et al. cited in Herusatoto, 2025: 462), social media has seen ‘inceldom’ appropriated by socially alienated heterosexual men who find a shared identity online. In such spaces and communities, such men ‘express rage at women for denying them sex and frequently fantasise about violence’ (Bosman et al. cited in Herusatoto, 2025: 462). A question arising from ‘inceldom’, and explored in episodes two and three of Adolescence, is that of why the above ideologies are relevant to the lives of young teenage boys.

With the one-shot aesthetic exerting its own limits on the structure of the series and how the narrative would unfold across the different episodes, the above range of elements were integral to the unusual power of Adolescence’s story. Alongside the teenage central character, the drama’s foremost characters are Jamie’s father, Eddie Miller (Stephen Graham), forensic psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), police investigators, DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and DS Misha Frank (Faye Marsay), Jamie’s mother, Manda Miller (Christine Tremarco) and sister, Lisa (Amélie Pease), and finally school students Jade (Fatima Bojang), DI Bascombe’s son, Adam (Amari Bacchus) and Ryan (Kaine Davis).

Adolescence was pitched first to Amazon Prime Video rather than to a UK broadcaster, with Amazon also funding the writing of the first script (Graham cited in Baughan, 2025). As Amazon deliberated on whether to commission the production, the trio wrote two further episodes. By the time Amazon declined the option, three of the four scripts were completed. Accordingly, ‘[w]hen we took it to Netflix’, Thorne explains, ‘they were able to see the scope of it. They greenlit us in the room during our first meeting’ (Thorne cited in Baughan, 2025).

Adolescence’s one-shot approach

While there are precedents for it in short films, feature films, and indeed in television’s earliest single plays, the aesthetic innovation of Adolescence in contemporary television is its application of a ‘one-shot’ approach throughout each of the four hour-long episodes. This one-shot approach offers a contemporary example of how the aesthetic of ‘naturalism’, whose defining characteristic is the strict observance of natural time, has escaped its historical limitations through the use of HD digital video capture, location shooting, and newer mobile filming technologies. ‘Naturalism’ can be distinguished from cinematic ‘realism’, the latter remaining the dominant aesthetic for high-end dramas, which entails filming one shot at a time, and using editing to facilitate temporal ellipses. Accordingly, the key repercussions of a one-shot approach to filming Adolescence are that the four episodes unfold in natural time, and without any edits or cuts possible, each needed to be shot in a single take.

The single take required each episode’s events to be structured and scripted around the constraints of spatial and temporal unity over the hour-long duration. This had significant impacts on rehearsing and filming. Each of the four episodes (abbreviated thenceforth as E1, E2, E3, and E4) was rehearsed and shot within one 3-week block. Two of these weeks were devoted to rehearsals, important to which were read throughs and walk throughs by actors and crew, during which movements of the camera were tested both with and without the actors present (The Making of Adolescence, Netflix, 2025). After 2 weeks of rehearsal, a third week (and full 5 days) was devoted to the shooting. On each shoot day there would be two or more full takes for the episode from which the best (which needed to be flawless) was selected. While the intention was to create 10 takes from which to choose, three of the episodes involved more. Stephen Graham reveals that while E1 used the second take, the other three episodes entailed more than 10 takes, with E2 using the 13^th take, E3 using the 12^th, and E4 using the 16^th (‘Stephen Graham for Adolescence’ interview, Conversations at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, 27 March 2025). What these numbers highlight is how the production team’s ambitions for each episode went beyond merely capturing the footage correctly, to creating additional choice about which of the successful takes offered the best actor performances. Highlighting the benefits of having more successful takes from which to choose and acknowledging that this increased Adolescence’s costs, Graham underlined that ‘Each take is completely different, there’ll be different things that other people may do that they didn’t do in the last take, and that’s what keeps it fresh’ (‘Stephen Graham for Adolescence’ interview, Conversations at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, 27 March 2025).

Led by Philip Barantini as the lone director, the single camera that filmed Adolescence needed to be passed with unusual care between different camera operators in different locations. With just one camera covering every action in an episode, camera movements also needed to be spatially linked to the action of a particular character, requiring carefully rehearsed and choreographed work by camera operators and actors to allow the character then in frame to effectively deliver the action to the next character, all the while ensuring that the frame and mise-en-scène betrayed nothing of the meticulous choreography (for camera, actors and locations) this entailed. While the majority approach to filming was a handheld camera, with dollies and cars used where necessary, there was an ambitious drone shot in E2, whose challenge began with the 60-plus metre height of the ‘Eye-of-God’ perspective involved. Barantini’s idea that the camera would ‘fly’ in the last 6-8 minutes of E2, produced what is arguably Adolescence’s most extraordinary visual and most challenging manoeuvre for crew and camera. One challenge in capturing this drone footage was that the wind at such height made it extremely difficult to get a smooth shot; with Barantini confirming that the drone footage was only successfully captured in one of the different takes (Barantini, RTS interview, 31 March 2025). Another challenge was that, on either side of this drone footage, waiting crew needed to first attach and then decouple the camera from its drone vehicle, taking care to avoid even a minor jolt which would have revealed this transfer, destroyed the illusion and broken the fourth wall.

E2 was already among the most difficult and costly shoot of the series, given its setting at the fictional school that Jamie and Katie both attended and the large number of extras (around 350) involved. The extras were needed for the fire drill sequence in which a tennis court is filled with students and Jade, the grieving best friend of Katie, delivers punches that knock Ryan, Jamie’s friend, to the ground. The drone sequence is pivotal to the final minutes of the episode and is flanked on either side by the actions of characters Ryan, DI Bascombe, DS Frank, Adam, Jade and finally Eddie. The drone sequence – which is underscored by music; a cover of the Sting song ‘Fragile’ by a choir of children – is detailed here to underline the precision of movement and timing for camera operators and actors that one-shot filming requires. The sequence follows DI Bascombe’s successful apprehension of Ryan, who is then arrested by DS Frank and dispatched in a police car. Bascombe walks back to his own car, hears the sound of the end-of-day bell, meets up with his son, Adam, and, after a conversation about where they will buy fish and chips, the pair drive off. Entering in the empty space the car leaves behind, Jade walks across the frame, with the camera following her onto the pedestrian crossing. Once in place on the other side of the road, Jade walks off into the distance, and the camera begins its ascent into the sky as the ‘Fragile’ song starts to play. The drone portion takes roughly 2 minutes, within which the camera ascends, navigating mature trees as it moves upward to full height, and continues its ethereal journey down the school’s main road. Towering above the school buildings, the drone shot adds invaluable spatial context. It shows the entire school campus (the location for which was Minsthorpe Community College) at the far end of which is the carpark, the site of Katie’s death. As ‘Fragile’ continues its underscore, the drone camera begins its descent, moving toward the carpark, in the far corner of which are flowers, bystanders and a police car which together mark the spot where Katie died. Positioned alongside these is Eddie Miller’s van. As the drone descends to within two metres of the ground, the camera is decoupled from it to once again be handheld, and Eddie exits his van, carrying his own bouquet for Katie, taking the centre of frame as the episode ends.

Adolescence’s narrative: four windows into Jamie’s world

With the previous section demonstrating the additional complexity for the shooting process brought by the one-shot aesthetic, the current section focuses on the key revelations each episode offers. Instead of involving temporal or thematic continuities, as with most high-end drama serials, Thorne characterises the narrative structure as providing a set of ‘windows’. He explains that, ‘You get four different windows into Jamie’s world. But it was working out where those windows were best placed so that we could understand him’ (Thorne, The Making of Adolescence, Netflix, 2025). Thorne’s assertions underline how the narrative idiosyncrasies of Adolescence arose partly from the decision to use one-shot filming throughout. The four ‘windows’ were selected to assemble and juxtapose the different perspectives that allow Adolescence to ultimately show how it became possible for a 13-year-old boy from an ostensibly normal working-class family to murder a female classmate.

Netflix and PSB traditions in British TV drama

Netflix has direct commissioned a succession of high-end dramas from the UK’s screen production industry in recent years, including The Crown, Bridgerton, Fool Me Once, Baby Reindeer, and The Gentlemen. Among these, Adolescence demonstrates a close alignment with UK’s tradition of PSB-commissioned dramas that seek to engage what Gripsrud (2001: 231) terms the ‘democratic public sphere’ by identifying and providing discourses that contribute to the formation of public opinion on pressing societal issues. Perhaps because of this alignment, there have been suggestions that Adolescence has exploited expertise and talent that rightly belongs to the UK (rather than to a US-owned company) on the basis that these resources were developed by UK broadcasters, notably the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV.

Inferring that Adolescence occupies PSB territory, Jane Martinson (2025) observes that the drama ‘is everything public service broadcasting should be: hard-hitting programming featuring the kind of people often ignored in TV drama – in this case white working-class families in the north – discussed at the school gate and in parliament’. Her assertions allude to the cultural influence of such iconic PSB drama examples as Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC, 1982) and Mr Bates vs the Post Office (ITV, 2024), both of which, as widely watched and discussed shows, albeit produced in very different TV eras, ignited public discussions and political debates because of the urgent national problems they brought to public attention. Blackstuff contested the then dominant image of the unemployed as ‘dole bludgers’ by highlighting the social and psychological impacts of failing to get work. Making a timely intervention on a pressing issue, as Adolescence did on teenage male rage decades later, Blackstuff’s reception context was one in which 3 million British people were jobless and ‘unemployment was the burning social problem of the day’ (Millington, 1993: 119). Dramatising a real-life, then unresolved national scandal in which hundreds of UK postmasters were prosecuted for theft because of accounting errors made by a flawed computer system, Mr Bates stimulated political debate, as a result of which then PM, Rishi Sunak announced new legislation aiming to exonerate postmasters who were wrongly convicted and compensate them for their economic losses (Tim Baker, Sky News, 18 January 2024). Martinson’s comments invoke the way in which PSB-commissioned dramas have often functioned, or been expected to function, as public sphere media. Among the eight principles that were developed for UK PSB by the British Broadcasting Unit in the 1980s, Michael Tracey (1998: 26–32) highlighted the imperative for PSB programming to ‘serve the public sphere’ by allowing the nation to ‘speak to itself’. Adolescence’s public impacts will be explored later in this article, but this section considers the extent to which Netflix’s UK drama commissions have reduced the industrial separation of SVoD-commissioned from broadcast-commissioned productions.

Speaking at the 2025 Edinburgh TV Festival, Channel 4 senior executive, Louisa Compton accused Netflix of capitalising on Channel 4’s own cultural capital in commissioning Adolescence (Warrington, 2025). Compton claimed that Channel 4 had ‘developed and nurtured the talent that has allowed Netflix to come in as TV tourists and effectively commission’ this particular drama (Compton cited in Warrington, 2025). Netflix’s response to Compton’s criticisms is worth considering here, not least because it highlights how embedded in the UK screen industry Netflix regards itself to be.

First is the issue of whether Netflix, a US-owned yet near-global SVoD, can be regarded as a ‘tourist’ in respect of UK-produced TV dramas. Amanda Lotz (2021: 201) argues that Netflix’s high proportion of non-US originals and operation of commissioning hubs in a range of non-US markets has differentiated it from other multinational SVoDs to make Netflix a ‘zebra among horses’. Looking into the ratio of US to non-US Netflix commissions up to 2021, Lotz found that 58% of its originals (or 177 out of 306 productions) were produced outside the US (Lotz, 2021: 202). Also important in countering the ‘tourist’ accusation is that Netflix executives with input into the commissioning and development of Adolescence included British executives with extensive experience at senior levels of the UK TV industry. One is Anne Mensah, Head of Content under CCO, Bela Bajaria. Mensah was appointed to Netflix in 2018, after a period as Head of Drama at Sky UK, and prior to that a decade at the BBC. Current VP of Content for Netflix, Anna Mallett, also came to Netflix from UK roles, first as COO and Managing Director of BBC Studios and then as CEO of ITN, one of the largest British TV production companies. A third example is Toby Bentley, who leads development and delivery of content for Netflix UK. Bentley was appointed to Netflix in 2023 and brought vital creative experience as a former EP for UK indie, AC Chapter One. Of the above Netflix executives, Bentley’s input to Adolescence stands to counter perceptions that creative decisions about Netflix’s non-US originals are simply imposed by executives working in Netflix’s Silicon Valley HQ. When discussing the decision to close E2 of Adolescence by following the drone footage with an image of Eddie paying his respects to the murdered Katie by adding his own bunch of flowers to those placed at the spot where she died, Barantini attributed this idea to Bentley (Barantini, RTS interview, 31 March 2025).

Second, Netflix’s responses to Compton’s ‘tourist’ accusation help to reveal its strategy for the commissioning of UK dramas and its sense of belonging to the UK’s screen industry as a consequence of the successive dramas it has commissioned out of Netflix UK. Representing Netflix at the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention in 2025, Anna Mallet asserts that:

We are not a tourist. Adolescence, I think, is a great example of our strategy, which is to make local UK content for local UK audiences. It’s fantastic that it’s resonated globally, but we’re absolutely focused on the audience here. Netflix has been operating in the UK for fifteen years, over the last 4 years we’ve invested 6 billion [US dollars], we’ve worked with 200 production companies, and thousands and thousands of cast and crew. So, we see ourselves as very much part of the [UK’s production] ecosystem (Mallet, RTS Convention, September 2025).

Mallet moves on to emphasise the importance of ‘local audience’ appeal for UK-commissioned Netflix originals. Her comments suggest that ‘authenticity’, as this is perceived within the country in which a Netflix show is created, is more important as an initial consideration for Netflix commissioning executives than the potential a show may demonstrate at its pitching stage, for success in a broader range of countries. She explains that:

We are absolutely focused on local audiences first. Not just in the UK, we’ve got teams in Italy, Spain and France. I think if you do this authentically there are stories that will travel. I think it’s really, really hard to commission for a global audience. I think it’s about that authentic local storytelling which resonates in the UK and if they go on to be successful elsewhere, that’s fantastic, but that’s not where we start (Mallet, RTS Convention, September 2025).

It is impossible to know how the expected appeal of a Netflix UK original is balanced against Netflix’s decisions to invest in content that, once finished and released to non-UK Netflix platforms, may prove to be successful in Netflix’s near-global arena. However, in terms of Netflix’s UK commissioning, there is evidence that its UK dramas have also succeeded to an uncommon level in Netflix’s multinational array of markets. Speaking at the RTS’s London Convention in 2024, Ted Sarandos described the UK as ‘the birthplace of prestige television’ with ‘some of the very best writers, directors, producers, actors, crew, crafts and locations anywhere in the world’ (Sarandos cited in Creamer, 2024). Sarandos also revealed that Netflix ‘invests more [in the UK] than [in] any other country outside the US’, confirmed Mallet’s estimated spend on UK productions as US$ 6 billion, and noted that there were over 100 Netflix productions underway in late 2024 (Sarandos cited in Creamer, 2024).

Finally important, is Sarandos’ attribution of the above outcomes to the UK’s PSB culture along with the creative industry education and training available in the UK. Suggesting that UK commissions Fool Me Once, Baby Reindeer, Bridgerton, and The Gentlemen were Netflix’s four highest performing shows for 2024, Sarandos foregrounded the importance of ‘great public service broadcasters and institutions that nurture British talent and creativity’ that are ‘supported by regulations that encourage creativity, innovation and long-term thinking’ (Sarandos cited in Creamer, 2024). The irony of Sarandos’s comments to the RTS, however, is that the very qualities that Netflix and Sarandos most admire about UK television and film, as highlighted earlier in this article, are also under threat from the notable popularity of Netflix, with UK viewers (emphatically those aged 16–34) spending increasingly less time on UK broadcast platforms (Ofcom, 2025: 35) and more on SVoDs, especially Netflix (Ofcom, 2025: 32). Hence, even though Mallet suggests a local audience first strategy driving Netflix commissions, Sarandos confirms there are sound economic reasons for this in the UK’s case, which, outside of the US, make it unusual among the totality of markets in which Netflix commissions TV dramas.

The public impacts of Adolescence

With its creators aiming for it to provoke discussions, starting in British homes, Adolescence, with the active support of Netflix, has been given an educative role in several countries. This began just weeks after the drama’s debut when UK PM Keir Starmer held a meeting with Jack Thorne (Orlando, 2025). This drama’s unflinching portrayal of the possible effects of online misogynism on a fictional 13-year-old boy led to an unusual request by Starmer that Netflix make the show available to British schools, a move he described as ‘an important initiative’ (Henley, 2025) and one that Netflix’s Anne Mensah supported, noting that Adolescence had ‘captured the national mood, sparking important conversations’ (Mensah cited in McHugh, 2025). While it has been suggested that the content of Adolescence makes it a challenging text for younger adults (Orlando, 2025), the UK’s educational initiative was carefully managed. Key to this, was the involvement of UK charity organisation, Tender, to develop resources to assist teachers, students and parents in using the drama as an educational tool. By mid-2025 this UK initiative was in the process of being repeated in The Netherlands, Flanders and France, once again involving co-operation with Netflix and augmented by resources for teachers and students developed by educational providers. Flemish minister for media, Cieltje Van Achter, justified the educational use of Adolescence in Flanders by asserting that it ‘shows how digital influences and loneliness can lead some young people astray when they lack sufficient support’ and suggesting that the drama ‘highlights how adults and teachers are increasingly losing touch with the world of young people’ (Van Achter cited in Henley, 2025). In The Netherlands, the use of Adolescence in schools followed the intervention of MP Barbara Kathmann, whose comments underlined why schools were an appropriate environment in which to use Adolescence to assist teenagers. ‘By showing the series in classes’, she argued, ‘we can create a safe setting in which to discuss it and the issues it raises’ with the aim of ‘making teenagers more resilient and preventing them from being sucked into the manosphere and its pernicious consequences’ (Kathmann cited in Henley, 2025).

Proposals to limit the availability of social media to teenagers were well advanced before the release of Adolescence in March 2025 and it would be inaccurate to suggest that the widely watched Netflix drama initiated the ongoing debates in the UK and several other countries about whether or not the regulation of social media should be used as a means to reduce the risks of psychological or physical harm for children and teenagers. In 2023, the UK introduced the Online Safety Act, regulated by Ofcom, as its first step toward making the internet a safer environment, aiming to protect children. In 2025, Australia became the first country to introduce social media regulation for children and young adults. Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 came into effect on 10 December 2025. It went further than its UK predecessor by prohibiting access by under-16s to social media sites that require them to have an account. The key enforcement measures are age verification tools for under-16s and a fine of up to A$45 million for social media companies who fail to prevent under-16s from holding accounts (including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, You Tube and others) whilst they are located in Australia. While it is too soon to assess the ban’s impacts, debates as to whether they should emulate Australia’s ban are ongoing in a range of countries. Following the Australian government’s move to prohibit access to social media for under-16s, UK Conservative party leader, Kemi Badenoch, called for the UK to follow suit by banning social media for the same age group. In January 2026, Badenoch announced party-wide support for such a ban, criticising Keir Starmer and the current Labour government for ‘kicking the can down the road’ on this issue (Badenoch, 2026). The above outcomes confirm that Adolescence has made a public sphere contribution by encouraging public and political conversations about the risks of social media for vulnerable young adults, which may begin with online bullying but end in violent acts.

Conclusions

This article has examined Adolescence’s significance by foregrounding its institutional context as a Netflix-commissioned drama, its genesis, narrative distinctions and creative ambition as a rare example of the one-shot aesthetic being deployed for the entirety of a TV drama. It has highlighted Adolescence’s unusual cultural influence as a highly watched production whose engagement with concerns about the perceived risks for young adults of exposure to pernicious online content has seen it make important public sphere contributions in respect of these concerns. Underlining its unusual resonance in the UK, Adolescence overcame the barriers of its position behind a pay wall to became the first SVoD original to garner more viewers than UK broadcast shows. Yet Adolescence achieved an unusual international impact because as a Netflix commission it was available simultaneously in this SVoD’s multinational array of markets which allowed it to be viewed and discussed internationally, and to cultivate cultural influence on a near-global basis.

The narrative and aesthetic elements of Netflix cannot be understated as contributors to the unusual level of audience engagement that Adolescence received. Yet these are inseparable in terms of this drama’s significance, from the veracity of the story it told, which is entirely fictional, yet is rooted in working-class family life in Northern England and in real, recent acts of knife crime by UK teenagers. Powerfully narrated and visualised, this story has resonated with existing, widely felt public anxieties about the dangers for young adults that are posed by extreme online discourses. The objective of Adolescence’s creators was to stimulate conversation about these issues rather than to provide the answers and they approached this by deviating from some of the narrative and aesthetic conventions of murder investigation dramas. While its one-shot aesthetic aimed to foster unbroken audience engagement with the developments of each episode, the four ‘windows’ on Jamie’s world that operated as the architecture for the organisation of Adolescence’s story, ensured its sustained investigation into what drove Jamie’s actions, aiming to explain why he killed Katie. Accordingly, the ongoing significance of Adolescence is that in focusing on the motivations for such extreme violence on the part of teenage boys, it imbued existing debates about social media and under-16s with greater urgency, and responded to a serious societal issue at an opportune moment.

The creation of Adolescence for Netflix rather than for a broadcaster, constitutes an important turn for UK-produced dramas whose engagement with current issues positions them for public sphere impact. For decades of UK TV history, public sphere drama has been almost synonymous with the objectives and/or the commissions of UK PSBs, gaining crucial opportunities for creative innovation from the pursuit of cultural outcomes determined at a national level. Indicative of its alignment with this tradition, Adolescence drew some criticism of Netflix for using cultural capital and creative resources developed by UK PSBs. However, as this article shows, Netflix sees itself as embedded in the UK screen industry, and its drama commissioning strategy is one in which local authenticity is an important indication of a drama’s potential at pitching stage. The comments by Sarandos cited here, suggest that it is the perceived creative excellence of the PSB culture that the UK has developed that has attracted Netflix to commission drama there. Finally important, is that Jamie Miller stands out as one of TV drama’s most transgressive central characters. This distances him morally from his central character counterparts in iconic UK broadcast dramas, of which Mr Bates vs the Post Office (ITV, 2024) is a recent example. The history of central characters who commit criminally transgressive acts foregrounds TV dramas created for non-broadcast providers, with examples in HBO’s Tony Soprano, AMC’s Walter White and Showtime's Dexter Morgan. On this basis, it could be suggested that Adolescence, a drama whose central character is a 13-year-old killer, would have been problematic for a UK broadcaster to commission.