'We wanted to start a conversation': Adolescence's Hannah Walters on the TV show that defined 2025

This year, a four-part British TV drama shaped national conversation. Adolescence was talked about everywhere – at school gates, in pubs and during PMQs – as it became the most watched show on Netflix in 75 countries.

“Our overriding reason for wanting to make Adolescence was to use this amazing thing we call a TV in people’s living rooms, this window into people’s houses, to start a conversation,” says Hannah Walters, who was in the eye of the storm. Matriarch Productions, the company she set up with her husband, Stephen Graham, just five years ago was the creative force behind Adolescence.

“We wanted people to turn to whoever they were with and say, we need to think about this, because that could be us. It’s always there, percolating in the back of your mind as a parent or auntie or anybody who knows an adolescent. We wanted to push it to the front of everybody’s mind and say, let’s talk about this,” says Walters.

“We wanted to rip people’s hearts out, tear them up, put them back in, and let them deal with that heartbreak!”

By any metric they succeeded. In the UK, Adolescence became the first streaming show ever to top the official weekly TV ratings. Within three months, 142.6 million people worldwide had spent more than half a billion hours watching it.

They initially came for the star, Stephen Graham, whose ascent to the heights of must-watch, beloved global acting star has been a delight to witness. And they came for the style of Barantini and Lewis’s daring dance through multiple locations, hundreds of supporting artists and huge emotional scenes with just one trusty DJI Ronin 4D camera – even strapping it to a drone to travel between the school and the murder site in episode two.

But they stayed for the substance. Viewers hooked into the incredible portrayal of modern masculinity, the perils of the manosphere, the vital lessons in the codes of Instagram comments and subtleties of online bullying and coercion, the no-holds-barred depiction of the aftermath and exposure of a horrific and all-too-believable event in which a teenage boy has killed a girl from his school.

And then they talked.

The conversations reached the upper echelons of government. Jack Thorne, who co-wrote the show with Graham, visited Downing Street to talk with Keir Starmer and culture secretary Lisa Nandy. The series has been made available free of charge to be shown in schools.

Read more:

• Adolescence writer Jack Thorne: ‘I was as angry as Jamie in lots of ways’
• Adolescence forced the country to sit up and take notice. But what’s next?
• Stephen Graham and Steven Knight on class, boxing and new drama A Thousand Blows

“Using it as a learning tool for teachers to have discussions with these young adults is so important,” says Walters. “We’ve given it a kick up the bum. Because we all collectively need to talk about this, parents, teachers, government, everybody.

“Politics is politics. What they decide to do with it is completely up to them. But on a social scale, to make that shift in people’s minds is the most important thing. It’s metaphorically opening the bedroom door to speak to our children, who could be a lost generation if we are not careful.”

Adolescence joins Cathy Come Home, Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough, ITV’s Who Bombed Birmingham and most recently, Gwyneth Hughes’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office in a small subset of TV dramas that truly effect social change.

“And we’re newbies,” grins Walters.

“To achieve what we have in a short space of time is mindblowing. The past three years has been chaotic and exciting, and it ramped up this year. It’s gone pretty bonkers, we never imagined it would be like this.”

When Walters calls Big Issue from her home in Leicestershire, a pair of Emmy Awards sit on the shelf behind her. She looks back and laughs. “We had to buy another suitcase when we came back from Los Angeles. Because Stephen got three and I got one. When the luggage was coming round on the carousel, we let our bag of clothes go round about four times because we were too busy looking for the new suitcase with all the Emmys in it!”

International acclaim is a far cry from their aims and objectives.

“We assumed audiences would love it here and hoped it might do well in Europe. But then it snowballed. When we started to get viewing figures from around the world and it was number one in Saudi Arabia, that blew my mind.”

Matriarch Productions was also on a mission to tackle inequality in the culture industries. Both Walters and Graham understand how tough it is for working-class people to break into the TV and film industry.

“To get that first break is harder than ever,” says Walters. “People who passionately want to get into the industry are not able to for financial reasons, demographic reasons, geographical reasons.

“It was important for Stephen and I, being from the backgrounds we are from, both brought up by single mums – we lost my father when I was very young, Stephen’s mum brought him up until Pops came on the scene. Giving people a chance that wouldn’t get it otherwise is paramount to everything we do. On A Thousand Blows, there is a trainee in every single department and we offer the training scheme to people that wouldn’t get it usually.  

“We go to local communities, we went to Fully Focused [a youth-driven company focused on the next generation of filmmakers], and we’re champions of giving actors a break. Because we’ve got leverage, you know? It’s like playing Top Trumps – on Adolescence, we could say, you’ve got Stephen Graham here, so we’ll give you him if we are allowed to give opportunities to unrepresented people as well. And look at Owen Cooper.”

Look at Owen Cooper indeed. The teenager was one of thousands attending weekly acting lessons – in his case, at Drama Mob in Liverpool – before being spotted by the casting team. His phenomenal performance as 13-year-old Jamie Miller meant he also returned from the Emmys with a trophy in his luggage. Next up, he’s playing young Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.

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“Owen has remained the most humble, beautiful, kind, giving, appreciative young adult I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with,” says Walters. “And he continues to impress people, not just because he’s the youngest Emmy-winning actor in history, but because he’s such a joy and so appreciative.

“The beautiful thing about what we do, if you do it mindfully, from place of truth, is you create families. So we have an A Thousand Blows family, we have a Boiling Point family, and now we have an Adolescence family.”

The care and nurture Walters brings to producing television is clear.

“I’m married to Stephen and he’s the most unorganised person in the world,” she grins. “That is part and parcel for how we work. And Stephen’s very clear and lovely and complimentary when it comes to who does the legwork.

“He is very much a creative and incredibly on point when it comes to scripts and casting. He’s got this innate ability to be able to see how it’s going to end up. It marries well with my ability to pull things together, and we bounce off each other creatively. Then, as he calls it, I do the grown-up stuff! ‘Hannah, you do the grown-up stuff and I’ll do the fun stuff,’ is what he says. But I get to do the fun stuff too.”

That includes acting, of course. It comes back to the family vibe Matriarch aims to create. Philip Barantini began his directing career when Graham and Walters agreed to do a short version of Boiling Point. That’s how Barantini got an agent… and now look at him go.

“We said we could give him a couple of days. Did a 15-minute version and it really worked. It was Matt Lewis’s first thing as well. It was like, here you go, Phil, happy birthday! He got an agent, investors saw the short film and wanted to make it into a feature, and that just snowballed. Not he’s working with Ed Sheeran and Millie Bobby Brown!

“And I wasn’t supposed to be in it, by the way,” Walters adds. “But Jack told me he’d written a part for me and in the end, they wore me down.”

Again, Walters offers a unique perspective – on what it is like to have to give a pivotal performance in the middle of a one-hour, single-take drama, knowing that one slip will render everyone’s hard work to that point null and void?

“As an actor, it’s exhilarating and petrifying,” she says. “The fear comes over you in a wave and you have to push it down. You can’t start again so you have to be so prepared, to the point where if something goes wrong, you know your character and the scene so well you can wing it if you need to. That happens a lot.

“As much as Stephen and Jack wrote the most beautiful script, every tape was different because you’d have bits of improvisation, which is glorious. Because when it works, it works wonderfully.”

Matriarch Productions, the Walters-Graham partnership and the Barantini-Lewis double act are all now among the most in-demand film and TV makers in the world. Everyone wants in on the action, even Ed Sheeran – who called on Barantini to direct his new Netflix special One Shot.

But Walters has her feet on the ground as she looks to the future.

“There’s a ton of stories in Stephen’s head, for a start,” she says. “And we’ve got lots of new writers or directors that we want to work with.

“We want to remain true to who we are, telling really good, thought-provoking stories. Now we’ve got even more of a voice, we have the opportunity to tell more of the stories and showcase more of the unrepresented voices. We’ve opened that door, which also means streamers will take more risks. So let’s do something really morally important!”

What they said about Adolescence

Daniel Day-Lewis, triple Oscar-winning actor 

What an extraordinary piece of work. And wonderful to see that they made this piece of work and then the whole country was talking about it – in parliament, in the police force, in the arena of social work. It’s an amazing thing. And that lad, Owen Cooper, is extraordinary. The scene he has with Erin Doherty, who is a wonderful actress, the two of them, is incredible. Everything. There’s no point separating one piece from another because it’s so integral. Even the stuff they shot in the school, I couldn’t believe it. How did you do that with these throngs of hostile school kids roaming around? Somehow they made it work. I’m so proud of Stephen Graham – we worked together briefly many years ago and kept in touch. 

Brandi Carlile, singer-songwriter

Adolescence resonated so deeply with me as a parent. Watching your absolute worst fear unfold on the screen in real time. I think it started a really important conversation and national debate around cyber bullying, online radicalisation and the detrimental impact it has on young, vulnerable and fertile minds. 

I was absolutely blown away by Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper’s performances and the supporting cast. Not to mention the fact that it was all filmed in ONE take! This is art in its highest form, and I’ll never stop thinking about it.

Maddie Moate, CBeebies presenter 

Adolescence, as a cultural moment, was really important. Not only was it a beautifully made piece of television, but the conversation it started about bringing an awareness to this almost other language young people have online that us Millennials are completely unaware of was so important. It was a catalyst for a lot of conversations about online safety and protecting children from adult media, which is a conversation I am frequently part of – because I straddle both television and the online world, I make content for families, and I have lot of conversations with the government, with YouTube, with producers and creators about how we can protect children online. 

Jamie Laing, Podcaster and entrepreneur

The conversation around social media and why it’s so toxic in some places is so important. We are addicted to our phones and social media and it’s a really bad thing, especially for younger generations. I think we should treat social media and smartphones like we treat alcohol and cigarettes. Get off social media and go and meet your friends in the park.

Adolescence is available on Netflix. Season Two of A Thousand Blows is on Disney+ in January 2026

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