‘Lord of the Flies’: Classic Book Comes to Netflix in New Trailer

Will the book everyone reads in school become a show everyone watches on Netflix?

If nothing else, Netflix got a buzzy creator to tackle the canonical children’s literature classic Lord of the Flies: Jack Thorne, the co-creator and co-writer of their recent TV hit Adolescence. (Thorne also wrote Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. If you need someone to tackle your property about screwed-up British schoolkids, he’s your guy!)

Based on the 1954 novel by William Golding that everyone alive has read in school, Lord of the Flies follows a group of British children stranded on an island by a plane crash. Waiting for rescue, they try to create their own miniature society, but things quickly descend into madness and violence, which has largely been read by critics and scholars (and tenth graders in English class) as an allegory for larger society’s push and pull between order and chaos.

The trailer for Thorne’s Lord of the Flies adaptation looks pretty faithful to the book. Gotta respect the IP! Otherwise that’s where the true chaos begins. You can watch the trailer below:

The most famous adaptation of the film to the screen was made in 1963, directed by Peter Brook. If your English class made you watch a version of the film after reading the novel, it was likely that one — although there was also an adaptation made in 1990, which starred American actors, including a young Balthazar Getty and James Badge Dale.

Here is the new series’ official synopsis:

Innocence descends into savagery when a group of English schoolboys becomes desert island castaways in the first television adaptation of William Golding’s landmark dystopian classic.

Lord of the Flies is scheduled to premiere on Netflix on May 4. The series consists of four one-hour episodes.