Adolescence co-creator Jack Thorne has rubbished misinformation about knife crimes being committed in the U.K. "only by Black boys" and fake theories about how the ethnicity of the lead character, the 13-year-old boy arrested for a female colleague's murder, was changed from black to white.
This insinuation was made worse by the fact that Elon Musk boosted this "anti-white" conspiracy theory by tweeting "Wow" to the post without additional comments.
The unnecessary politicisation of the series and its subject matter was addressed by Thorne in a podcast for The News Agents. “We’re not making a point about race with this. We are making a point about masculinity. We’re trying to get inside a problem. We’re not saying this is one thing or another. We’re saying this is about boys,” he said.
Co-creator and lead actor Stephen Graham, who plays the boy's father in the chart-busting Netflix series, has clarified in multiple interviews that the series is based on multiple instances of knife crimes and it's not about one particular case. He also brought attention to the fact that young boys were being brainwashed by red pill communities online.
In an earlier interview with Deadline, Thorne asked why "violence from young men or boys towards young women or girls is going up," and added, “I hope what we’ve done is shine a light on an area which has been talked about but not looked at. This is an issue that everyone has been aware of, but discovering it through Jamie is something we’ve been set on capturing. That people are excited to watch and understand Jamie and try to understand the issue through Jamie, is rewarding.”