When Adolescence dropped on the 2025 TV schedule earlier this year, I plowed through the four-part series chronicling the fallout of a vicious murder of a teenage girl and immediately wanted to know where the series would go from there, if it were to continue. What co-creators Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham created with the massively popular 2025 Netflix series was both a technical masterpiece and storytelling at its finest. But will it continue?
I recently caught up with Thorne, who also penned the upcoming Enola Holmes 3, and made sure I asked him about whether Adolescence will return for a second season, as it's been a popular topic of conversation among fans. While he really liked telling the story of Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a 13-year-old accused of killing a female classmate with a knife, he has a different idea for what could be next.
There's gonna be no continuation. The Miller story, we think, is told. We might find a way of using the one-shot. We are talking about finding ways to use the one-shot more in a different way. And we’d love to do that. Maybe it’s about the team versus finding a new story that we're just as passionate about telling. So we're working on that, and talking about that, but we haven't found the answer completely yet, to be honest.
As our conversation continued, the prolific TV writer and playwright admitted there is something someone could do with Jamie Miller or even further flesh out Katie Leonard’s (Emilia Holliday) story. However, even if this is true, Season 2 is not currently in the pipeline:
There is stuff you could do with Jamie as a character. Of course there is. But it feels like we've finished telling his story. We've finished telling what bits we want to tell. And people say it’d be brilliant to see Katie's perspective. And you're like, well, yes, but maybe we are not the right people to tell Katie's story.
Though it seems unlikely that we’ll see more of Jamie Miller after the heartbreaking Season 1 finale or anyone from Adolescence ever again (can we get more from the school and its Wire vibes?), it does sound like Thorne is very much interested in exploring the one-shot format and other storytelling techniques he and co-creator Stephen Graham (he also plays Jamie’s dad in the show) developed alongside director Philip Barantini to try something else in the future:
I think all the characters from Adolescence are rested, and now we're trying to find a new way of using that vocabulary because we love it. And we love working together.
Exactly what that idea is remains a mystery at this point, as Thorne didn’t share many details about it. It sounds like he has a lot on his plate with the aforementioned Enola Holmes 3 as well as his take on Lord of the Flies, an upcoming book-to-screen adaptation of William Golding’s landmark novel.
If you haven’t watched Adolescence, despite it being one of the biggest shows streaming this year, all four episodes are available with a Netflix subscription.
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