I watched Lord of the Flies the weekend it dropped on Netflix, all four episodes in a single sitting, and by the time the credits rolled on Jack I was already thinking about Adolescence. Not in a passing way. In a structural, thematic, almost compulsive way. Jack Thorne has now written two limited series in two years about boys doing terrible things, and the second one rhymes with the first so deliberately that you can't treat it as coincidence.
The surface differences are obvious. Adolescence is set in a Yorkshire town in 2025. Lord of the Flies is set on a nameless Pacific island in some indeterminate post-evacuation now. One is shot in unbroken single takes, the other in fragmented, fevered montage. One ends with a father weeping into a teddy bear. The other ends with a naval officer asking, mildly, who is in charge here.
But the questions underneath are identical. Both shows refuse to give you a tidy explanation for why a boy hurts another person. Both shows make you sit with the discomfort of liking these children before they become unrecognizable. Both shows treat the adult world as complicit through absence rather than malice.
What changed between 2025 and 2026, I think, is Thorne's confidence in withholding. Adolescence still gestures, in its final episode, at causes — the manosphere, the algorithm, the language Jamie picked up online. Lord of the Flies refuses even that much comfort. It hands you four boys, names each episode after one of them, and dares you to find the pathology. You will not find it. That refusal is the thesis.
The Structural Rhyme: Interrogation Room and Island
The cleverest thing Thorne does in Lord of the Flies is borrow Adolescence's episodic logic and apply it to William Golding. Adolescence gave each of its four hours to a different vantage on Jamie: the arrest, the school, the psychologist, the family. The boy himself only fully speaks in episode three. The rest of the time we are reading him through other people's rooms.
Lord of the Flies does the same trick, but the rooms are inside the boys.
- Ralph is the longest episode and the closest to traditional adaptation. We get the conch, the signal fire, the first flicker of leadership. Ralph is the show's nominal protagonist and also, crucially, its narrative trap.
- Piggy breaks that assumption. Episode two is shot almost entirely in close-up, restricted to what Piggy can see without his glasses, and it ends not at his death but at the moment he realizes the other boys have stopped hearing him.
- Simon is the strangest hour, a forty-eight minute interior fugue with almost no dialogue. Thorne treats Simon's encounter with the pig's head as a kind of religious vision and refuses to translate it.
- Jack is the finale, and it is the episode that makes the Adolescence comparison unavoidable. It is structured like Jamie's psychologist hour. Just a boy and a question and the slow, terrible answer.
This is the rhyme. Both shows use the four-episode container to triangulate a child the audience cannot directly access. You are always reading him through someone.
What Adolescence Asked
To understand what Lord of the Flies is doing differently, I have to be precise about what Adolescence actually asked. Because most of the discourse around that show, in my opinion, misheard the question.
Adolescence was widely received as a manosphere story. Jamie killed Katie because of Andrew Tate, because of incel forums, because of emojis adults couldn't decode. The Prime Minister cited it. Schools held assemblies about it.
That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The show's actual question, which I think Thorne stated most clearly in the psychologist episode, is: *what does a boy do with a feeling he has no name for and no permission to have?* The manosphere is the answer Jamie reached for, but the show is interested in the reaching, not the destination. If the internet had not existed, Jamie would have reached for something else.
The fourth episode is the proof of this reading. It is the Miller family on a Sunday. No internet. No incel forums. Just Eddie unable to say the word love to his son without breaking, and Manda absorbing it, and Lisa watching from the doorway. The radicalization was already in the house. The phone was just the delivery mechanism.
Adolescence ended with a father apologizing to a teddy bear. That image was not a metaphor for failed parenting. It was a metaphor for a kind of male inarticulacy that has nothing to do with TikTok and everything to do with three generations of men not knowing how to say what they feel out loud.
What Lord of the Flies Asks Differently
If Adolescence asks what a boy does with an unnamed feeling, Lord of the Flies asks what a group of boys does with the same feeling, multiplied and unsupervised. The shift from singular to collective is the whole point of going back to Golding.
The novel, written in 1954, was essentially a thesis statement: civilization is a thin veneer. Golding's boys descend because human nature is corrupt. The book is Augustinian. The dark is in them already and the island just lets it out.
Thorne does not believe this, and his adaptation works overtime to disagree. His boys do not descend. They organize. They make choices, in sequence, that each look reasonable from inside the choice and monstrous from outside it. Jack does not become a savage. Jack becomes a project manager of fear. Roger is not evil. Roger is a kid who finally found something he is good at and the thing is cruelty.
- The novel says: boys are like this underneath.
- Thorne's adaptation says: boys become like this through choices the adult world has stopped helping them avoid.
- Adolescence said: the choices look like radicalization but they are actually grief looking for a shape.
- Lord of the Flies says: the choices look like savagery but they are actually the same grief, with no adults to even fail at containing it.
The boys on the island are Jamie without the Sunday morning. There is no kitchen scene to come home to. There is no teddy bear waiting.
The Masculinity Panic Refused
Both shows could have been — and in the case of Adolescence were widely received as — contributions to the masculinity panic. The cultural moment is ready for a Big Statement about boys: what is wrong with them, who broke them, how do we fix them. There is a small industry of opinion columns waiting for exactly this material.
Thorne refuses to write that show. Twice now.
He refuses it in Adolescence by making the psychologist episode an interrogation of the audience's desire for a diagnosis. Briony does not get one. We do not get one. The closest thing to a thesis Jamie offers is "I could have done nothing," which is not an explanation, it is a glimpse of the void where an explanation should be.
He refuses it in Lord of the Flies by stripping out every adult interpretive frame Golding built. There is no Beast as theological symbol. There is no naval officer as ironic civilization. The officer at the end of the finale is just a tired man on a beach asking a procedural question while Ralph, twelve years old, cannot speak.
What both shows are actually doing is documenting a refusal. They refuse to let boys be problems. They refuse to let masculinity be a diagnosis. They refuse to let parents be either villains or heroes. They refuse to let the internet be the cause. They refuse to let the absence of the internet be exculpatory either.
That refusal is, I think, why the discourse around Adolescence was so frustrating to sit through, and why I expect the discourse around Lord of the Flies to be worse. The shows are doing something subtle. The conversation around them wants something loud.
Why Thorne Keeps Coming Back Here
Jack Thorne is fifty years old. He has a son. He has written, in the past three years, two of the most precisely observed studies of boyhood in contemporary television, and the questions he is asking are not getting answered, they are getting sharper.
I think he comes back to this material because he does not know either. That is the honest read. Thorne is not a writer with a thesis about boys that he is illustrating across multiple projects. He is a writer with a worry, and the worry is large enough that he has to keep approaching it from new angles to even map its edges.
Adolescence was the contemporary, domestic angle. A boy you could pass in a corridor. A family you could meet at a school gate.
Lord of the Flies is the mythic angle. The same boy, the same family, but with the contemporary scaffolding removed so you can see the shape of the question more clearly. No phones. No teachers. No parents. No school. Just the boy and the other boys and what they do with the time.
The two shows together function as a single argument. You cannot blame the phone, because here is the island with no phone and the same outcome. You cannot blame the parents, because here are no parents and the same outcome. You cannot blame the culture, because here is no culture and the same outcome. What is left? That is the question. Thorne does not answer it. He just keeps pointing.
The boys on the island are not a parable. They are a mirror. Adolescence already told us that, in 2025. Lord of the Flies is just making sure we did not look away.