The Chilling Inspiration Behind Netflix’s Murderous Miniseries Adolescence Revealed

It’s a question Graham hopes to address, noting to Netflix’s website Tudum, that one of their aims was to ask, “What are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet, and from social media?”

And for him, it was important to show that Jamie came from a stable household so viewers could focus more on his actions versus those of his mom and dad. 

“When I hear these things on the news, I know I’m not alone in blaming the parents sometimes,” the actor recently told Rolling Stone U.K. “And then I thought to myself, ‘What if it’s not the parents?'”

Taking this approach also emphasized the question, how well does a parent really know what their teen is doing?

“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,” Graham explained to Tudum. “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.”