Everyone in the UK is talking about . Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, the hit TV drama follows the investigation into a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a female classmate. It has sparked conversations about social media and the so-called manosphere, an online community of misogynistic influencers.
It has been so widely praised that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently met the team behind Adolescence to discuss the online radicalisation of teenage boys. Meanwhile, the leader of the UK’s Conservative party, Kemi Badenoch, endured a minor media firestorm after revealing she hadn’t seen the series.
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I am not here to give my view on whether in UK schools will lessen misogyny among children. But what it did make me wonder is which other TV series our political leaders should be watching – and why the most pressing crisis of our times is yet to receive the Adolescence treatment.
Television, perhaps more than any other medium, is seen as a vehicle for change. Thorne has called it the ““: it lives in our homes, evolving alongside us and making us better people.
Sometimes, it really does work like that. The 1960s drama Cathy Come Home led to the creation of homelessness charity Crisis, while a 2018 survey found that women in the US who regularly watched The X-Files were more likely to believe that . And the 2024 drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office – about the hundreds of UK Post Office employees wrongly prosecuted due to a faulty IT system – led to more than 100 new potential victims seeking legal advice.
But one issue where this hasn’t happened is climate change. While documentaries have long played their part in informing the public about ecological crises, they don’t seem to be enough. Take the 2017 series Blue Planet II. This is with raising awareness of marine plastic pollution, yet there is little evidence it caused .
So could television really help save our planet? Fiction, not fact, may be key. is a prosocial behaviour and that acting for the is vital for passing climate legislation. Heavy viewers of fictional TV have also been shown to than do viewers of news and documentaries, which could prove crucial in stopping climate nihilism from taking hold.
We also know that – which encourages individuals to see themselves as small elements of a far larger world – is a powerful tool for . Science fiction may therefore be uniquely helpful: last year, that sci-fi was distinct in its ability to inspire awe and was linked to people identifying with all humanity. Even the act of imagining the future might encourage leaders to look beyond the next election and take .
What we need, then, is an Adolescence for climate change. If I could choose an existing series for politicians to watch, I would pick the 2019 drama , which followed a British family living through the rise of fascism as the planet burns. For All Mankind – an alternate history of the space race, in which greater investment in new technologies slows down global warming – might also prove inspirational.
But some yet-to-be-adapted sci-fi novels would be even better. Who could watch a small-screen version of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest or Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and not be inspired to save our precious home planet? The opportunities are endless – we just need some fantastic writers to take them. Perhaps that could be Thorne and Graham’s next project.
Bethan Ackerley is New Scientist’s television columnist, and a subeditor
