Jack Thorne writes young people whose bravado cannot quite hide how frightened they are. We rate his television highly when he lets them speak for themselves; his weaker passages explain what the actors have already made clear.
Fi1m perspective
In Skins (2007), a teenager can sound pleased with themselves and expose their uncertainty in the same sentence. Jack Thorne is one of the writers, alongside Lucy Kirkwood, who give that uncertainty room amid the jokes and provocation. We felt protective of these irritating teenagers because their speech kept giving away their doubt. This is where we trust Thorne most: with people who have not found a convincing way to ask for help.
His early ensemble work also includes Shameless (2004), with Paul Abbott and Daniel Brocklehurst among the contributors. There, the strongest exchanges let actors shift between pettiness, evasion and unexpected kindness; the weaker ones keep announcing how outrageous everyone is. The subsequent work takes him from co-writing the This Is England miniseries (2010–2015) with Shane Meadows to overseeing the fantasy adaptation His Dark Materials (2019–2022) as writer and showrunner. Those changes of scale have not displaced his recurring concern with young people under pressure.
Adolescence (2025), written with Stephen Graham, brings that concern into a crime drama about the accusation against a child. Philip Barantini’s direction keeps the distress immediate, giving the performances the force that an account of social pressures alone would lack. We recommend it despite passages where Graham and Thorne explain online misogyny so insistently that the dialogue starts to sound instructional. The script for Toxic Town (2025), credited to Thorne and Amy Trigg, has a related weakness: the mothers have lives beyond their campaign, but some of those opposing them are made too obviously objectionable.
Lord of the Flies (2026), made with director Marc Munden, gives the actors more room. Shifting between the boys’ perspectives allows different fears to matter, while sparse dialogue lets the cast suggest what the children cannot comfortably say. Their desire to be accepted makes the question of whom they will obey more troubling than the practicalities of survival. Four episodes stretch the material, sometimes holding the tension at much the same level for too long. Start here for Thorne’s sympathy at its most unsettling, allowing for stretches that a tighter adaptation could have lost.
Biography
Jack Thorne (born 6 December 1978) is a British playwright, screenwriter and producer from Bristol.
He studied politics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and trained on the Royal Court Theatre's Young Writers' Programme. He is known for the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016), screenplays for the films Wonder (2017) and the Enola Holmes series (2020–2022), and television work including co-writing the This Is England mini-series ('86, '88 and '90) with Shane Meadows, and creating or writing His Dark Materials (2019–2022), Toxic Town (2025), Adolescence (2025) and the 2026 television adaptation of Lord of the Flies.
