Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B is in talks to develop another season of Adolescence, after the British show became a runaway hit on Netflix.
Speaking to Deadline in their first interview since the show took off on the streaming platform last month, co-presidents Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner said they are speaking to director Philip Barantini about the “next iteration” of the show, a critical success that has ignited conversations about children’s susceptibility to toxic masculinity online.
The four-episode series, each filmed in one take, tells the story of a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, played by Owen Cooper, accused of stabbing a female classmate, Katie, to death after being sucked into the online “manosphere”.
Gardner said the development team was considering ways to “widen the aperture” of the show, “stay true to its DNA, [and] not be repetitive”. Kleiner added that they hoped series co-creator and writer Stephen Graham, who plays the boy’s father, as well as writer Jack Thorne, would return for a second season.
Graham and his wife and producing partner, Hannah Walters, have already hinted at a second outing for a show designed as a one-off, though nothing has been confirmed. “Possibly, let’s see how the figures are,” Graham told Variety when asked about a follow-up. “But yeah, there’s the possibility of developing another story.” Walters said she would happily work with Netflix “all day long”, but that “it’s hard” to follow up a success like Adolescence.
The show has become an international hit for the global streaming platform, amassing 114.5 million viewers since its release on 13 March. It became the first streaming show to top weekly ratings in the UK and set a new Netflix record for a limited series with 66.3 million viewers after two weeks. This week it also became the platform’s fourth biggest English-language series ever.
Its themes of online extremism, violence and complicity struck a cultural nerve across countries, speaking to fears about online misogyny pitched to children. Netflix has made the series available to all secondary schools in the UK.
A second season would presumably focus on different characters in a different setting, at least according to Thorne. “Jamie’s story is finished,” he said in an interview with ITV from late March. “I don’t think there’s anywhere more we can take Jamie, so I don’t think there is a series two.
“Our aim was to try and tell Jamie’s story as fully as we possibly could, and maybe trying to tell [Katie’s] story would dilute that in some way and maybe we would be inadequate for that task,” he added.
Barantini, the director, also initially dismissed the idea of a second season. “I don’t personally [think there should be another series], I think it’s a package of this moment in time, and I think personally, that’s how I feel about it,” he told the Independent in March.
Speaking to Deadline, Gardner said Barantini’s one-take style was “essential” to the show’s success. “Phil’s style of doing the episodes in one take is not a gimmick. It’s very much in conversation with the subject matter,” she said. “In that kind of prismatic way of viewing, you can duck the issue. So our theory was, what would happen if you couldn’t look away? And will that make the subject embed in you in a different way? That was a thrilling thing.”
