‘Adolescence’ Writer on How Hit Drama Sparked False ‘Race-Swap’ Theory: ‘It Speaks to What the Whole Show Is About’

Netflix’s one-shot series “Adolescence” created much more than simply record-breaking viewing figures. Not long after debuting on the streamer, it sparked widespread debate in both the U.K. and overseas about knife crime, incel culture and the impact of social media on young boys, with the issues then discussed in British Parliament.

The phenomenal success of “Adolescence” also quickly led to claims that the story — about a young boy accused of murdering a female classmate — had taken a real-life crime in the U.K. and changed the antagonist from a Black child to a white child. These claims were circulated on social media, with Elon Musk using his own platform X to label the show as “anti-white propaganda.” Meanwhile, on home soil, leader of the Conservative Party Kemi Badenoch gave credence to the theory, and argued in interviews against any government policy being made based on a something that had taken a real-life story and had “fundamentally changed” it.

For writer Jack Thorne, who at the time labelled the claims “ridiculous” and said it wasn’t based on any one crime, the conspiracy theory about the show wasn’t just wildly inaccurate but also underlined exactly what it was trying to say about the dangers of online algorithms.

“That was the interesting thing about our show, how quickly it turned into this bouncing ball of lots of people having lots of different opinions on it, and lots of people saying lots of things like they were facts,” he said, speaking at a panel discussion at Content London. “And one fact that went round very quickly was that what they’ve done is they’ve taken a crime that was committed by a Black boy and they turned it into a crime committed by a white boy, because they’re woke and destructive and they hate white people.”

When it came to Badenoch herself supporting these claims, Thorne said that for to have clearly seen the race-swap theory as fact “speaks to her algorithm and speaks to what the whole show is about, in lots of ways.”

He added: “We are in a situation where what we are fed is what we believe, and in this sort of post-facts era that we live in, it was fascinating to be part of that whole question and spoke to all the themes that we were trying to talk about.”