“One in all our goals was to ask, ‘What is going on to our younger males lately, and what are the pressures they face from their friends, from the web, and from social media?’ ” Graham stated. “And the pressures that come from all of these issues are as troublesome for youths right here as they’re the world over.”
He added: “We might have made a drama about gangs and knife crime, or a couple of child whose mom is an alcoholic or whose father is a violent abuser,” stated Graham to Tudum. “As a substitute, we needed you to take a look at this household and suppose, ‘My God. This might be taking place to us!’ And what’s taking place right here is an strange household’s worst nightmare.”
In different phrases, Adolescence is probably not impressed by one true story — even worse, it’s impressed by many. And that actually is haunting.
Who’s Adolescence primarily based on?
Once more, it isn’t primarily based on one specific individual or case. Nonetheless, primarily based on what each Graham and Thorne have stated about their writing course of, there are a number of potential cases which will have been on their minds whereas they created the present.
“The place it got here from, for me is there was an incident in Liverpool, a younger lady, and she or he was stabbed to dying by a younger boy. I simply thought, why?” Graham informed Radio Instances.
He’s doubtless referring to the 2021 incident by which Ava White, a 12-year-old lady, was stabbed in Liverpool metropolis centre by a 14-year-old boy after an alleged “Snapchat row.”
Ava’s mom, Leanne White, made a press release following the discharge of Adolescence. “It is bought nothing to do with Ava in any way,” she informed BBC Radio Merseyside. “It makes me actually offended as properly that Ava’s title retains on getting put alongside — it is in regards to the perpetrator, it isn’t about Ava.”
She did, nonetheless, reward the present. “By them highlighting all the risks on social media and all of the unhealthy influencers like Andrew Tate… I feel that is a very good factor for them to be highlighting,” she stated.
Graham additionally talked about one other case in the identical Radio Instances interview: “Then there was one other younger lady in south London who was stabbed to dying at a bus cease. And there was this factor up North, the place that younger lady Brianna Ghey was lured into the park by two youngsters, and so they stabbed her. I simply thought, what’s occurring? What is that this that’s taking place?”
Ghey was a 16-year-old trans lady who was killed in 2024 in broad daylight in a village park in Cheshire. Ghey’s mom has lately been talking out in regards to the “horrors of the web world” after her daughter’s homicide. She options in a brand new ITV documentary, Brianna: A Mom’s Story, which airs 27 March on ITV1.
