Why TV was the perfect form for Netflix's new 'Lord of the Flies'

As a kid I had a lot of trouble sleeping.My only coping mechanism was to give up trying and read.

These were ancient times; we didn’t have the internet then, and I’d have got in trouble for turning on the (cathode ray) TV.My mum was substitute-teaching English and one of her schoolbooks was “Lord of the Flies.” It had a great name, it was bright orange and it had a pig’s head on the front.

I started reading it at about 2 in the morning and I remember every sensation of it.I think all of us in the art space have a moment when we feel suddenly seen.For me there were two characters growing up who made me go, to some degree, “That’s me.” One was Elliott from “E.T.” The other was Simon from “Lord of the Flies.” Kids who linger at the back of groups, desperate to join in, who yearn for understanding but perhaps don’t have the tools to elicit understanding, who spend as long staring into space as they do speaking.

I remember pulling through the pages of the book going, “This is me, I understand the cruelty others are showing him, I understand his need for both distance and warmth.”Then Simon was killed.In fact, when I was first reading it, I wasn’t sure whether Simon was killed.

Because Golding’s account of his death was so deliberately confounding, I wasn’t sure what happened.Then Golding wrote, “Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon’s dead body moved out towards the open sea.” And my heart was pulled clear from my body.

My Simon, and he felt like mine, was gone.I love television, I love writing and adapting for television.But with adaptation the crucial question always is, What’s television got to give something? What has the medium got to give, with its vocabulary? The thing that I felt television had to give “Lord of the Flies” was simple.

It was chapters.That’s what TV can do that film can’t, that theater can’t.

It ...