Stephen Graham’s ‘Adolescence’ attains huge viewing figures on Netflix
Netflix has revealed Stephen Graham’s new drama Adolescence has been an unexpectedly enormous hit in its first four days of availability on the streaming platform.
During the week of March 10th to March 16th, the harrowing one-take drama about a schoolboy accused of murder attained an impressive 24.3 million views. Amazingly, this made it second in views only to The Electric State, the streamer’s new $320 million blockbuster starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt. This is quite a feat for a small drama from the UK with such serious subject matter.
Looking further into the numbers, Adolescence was by far and away the most-watched television show on Netflix that week. Its closest competition was Running Point, the new Kate Hudson sitcom, which nabbed six million views, and Robert De Niro’s Zero Day, which attained 4.4 million. Its performance also eclipsed the opening weekends of recent Netflix Originals like The Night Agent season two (13.9 million views) and the aforementioned Zero Day (19.1 million views).
The fact that Adolescence has reached so many viewers in such a short time will feel like a real victory for Graham, who not only starred in the show but also co-wrote and executive-produced it. In fact, the entire project stemmed from an idea he had after reading an article about the knife crime epidemic among young people in the UK.
“Look, it started when I read an article, and it was an article about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl to death, and it just, you know, it made me feel cold,” Graham told Chris Moyles on Radio X. “And then a couple of months later, there was a piece on the news, and it was about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl to death, and if I’m really honest with you, they hurt my heart. And these two incidents were opposite ends of the country.”
The Peaky Blinders star continued, “I just thought, ‘Why? Why is this happening?’ Not just because I’m a father, but I think any kind of human being with an ounce of moral compass can look at that kind of situation and think, ‘What’s happening? What’s going on with society today that we’re in?'”