Adolescence, the chilling Emmy-winning 2025 miniseries that Jack Thorne co-created, felt very much a spiritual descendant of William Golding's classic novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of English schoolboys who turn feral when stranded on a desert island after a plane crash. Though Adolescence took place back in what we think of as civilization, it was nonetheless a tragic tale of what happens when boys of a certain age are left unsupervised in a space (in this case, the virtual one of the Internet) that they're not emotionally prepared to handle on their own.
That Thorne helped craft such an outstanding variation on the classic story would seem to make redundant the idea of him doing a literal adaptation of Golding's book. But his four-part take on Lord of the Flies is excellent in its own right. It understands why the story has resonated for over 70 years, and become a middle school English class perennial — and the ways in which it feels especially, unfortunately, timely at the moment.
Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of the boys who survived the crash: Piggy (David McKenna), preternaturally wise but dismissed because of his weight, eyeglasses, and struggles with asthma; Jack (Lox Pratt), leader of their school choir, who embraces the chaos and freedom of life on the island with savage gusto; Simon (Ike Talbut), a quiet boy who understands Jack better than even Jack understands himself; and Ralph (Winston Sawyers), caught between the burdens of leadership and his desire to have fun like Jack and his band of hunters.