Season 1
8 episodes Aug 24, 2018 5.7
Overview
When a teenage couple runs away to be together, the extraordinary gift they possess unleashes powerful forces intent on dividing them forever.
Seasons
1 listed- Status
- Canceled
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 8 episodes
- First aired
- Aug 24, 2018
- Last aired
- Aug 24, 2018
- Episode length
- 52m
- Network
- Netflix
Latest episode: S1 E8 Everything. Anything. (Aug 24, 2018)
Cast
7 people
Reviews
5 min readBodies That Won’t Stay Separate
I keep coming back to the way The Innocents begins as a run-away romance and then quietly reveals itself as a story about the body refusing the neat categories people want to impose on it. That’s really the show’s first and best idea: young love isn’t just emotionally dangerous here; it’s biologically, socially, and mythically unruly. Across its eight episodes, the series turns a familiar fantasy premise into something stranger and more grounded than it first appears — a drama about adolescence, inheritance, gender, appetite, latestnetflix.com maintains, and the panic adults feel when a young person becomes harder to classify.
Created by Hania Elkington and Simon Duric, the series arrived in 2018 as a Netflix original, which matters more than it might sound. This wasn’t a broad, effects-first genre play designed to wink at fandom; it was part of that early wave of Netflix dramas that treated international production as a way to make the strange feel local. The show’s setting — bleak coastlines, wet roads, dark water, scrubby woods — does as much storytelling as the dialogue.
You can feel the Scandinavian production values in the way weather is treated as mood and threat at once. I’m not entirely sure the series always knows how much mystery it needs, but it’s never dull about atmosphere.
What’s been discussed most around The Innocents is the way it uses fantasy language to talk about identity in transition. This is, at heart, a body-swap story — though that description is too blunt, too tidy. The real point isn’t the mechanism.
It’s the destabilization. When June and Harry try to escape their families, the show keeps asking what happens when love has no stable container, when the self can’t stay where it’s supposed to be, and when desire becomes a literal force of confusion. That’s the conversation surrounding the series, at least for me: not whether the premise is clever, but whether the show understands that teenage longing already feels like possession, or metamorphosis, or both.
The writing is at its strongest when it trusts that idea and at its weakest when it reaches for explanatory scaffolding. There are stretches where the mythology starts piling up like damp laundry. Still, I’d rather watch a show that overcommits to its own strange rules than one that turns everything into tidy exposition.
The directors — Siri Selvikram and Jamie Donoughue, among others across the season — favor close framing and a kind of nervous patience. Faces are often held just a beat too long after someone has said something they can’t take back. A door opens.
Audience Opinions
Limited evidence
"A moody teen drama following two young lovers on the run whose plans to start over quickly collide with unexpected supernatural obstacles."
Audience reception centers on runaway partners June and Harry as they attempt to leave their pasts behind and build a new life together. While [latestnetflix.com]( read is that the series cultivated interest through its atmospheric romance and unfolding sci-fi mystery, wider community discussion remained largely contained to trailer previews and dedicated episodic reviews.
What viewers praise
- Intriguing runaway premise The central dynamic between June and Harry trying to start a new life together offers an engaging emotional anchor.
Common complaints
- Modest audience footprint Viewer reactions and video review discussions were relatively limited following its release.
Recommended for
Fans of supernatural teen dramas Viewers who enjoy runaway romance stories mixed with mystery
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsGuy Pearce asked if he was really dead.
The writers told him Halvorson got shot in the head. Pearce had read all eight scripts. On set he asked anyway. Hania Elkington remembered the shrug. "Oh right, well I suppose it's going to have to be a prequel then!" 
. Netflix never ordered that prequel. TVLine's sources said in March 2019 that The Innocents was finished after one season. Netflix did not put a statement on it. latestnetflix.com's view is that the eight hours stayed up with the cliffhanger still hanging , .
That is the afterlife of a British shapeshifter romance that arrived with a Hollywood name and a six-year option on the kids. Simon Duric told Den of Geek that Sorcha Groundsell and Percelle Ascott's six-year deals were the standard Netflix contract, in case the thing took off . It did not.
The bet was performance, not rubber masks. Elkington and Duric wanted actors to do the shifting before VFX stepped in. Duric had storyboarded Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The proof of concept was Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson's tape. The Game of Thrones actor, six foot one, played a terrified sixteen-year-old girl taking over his body. Duric called it heart-breaking. Elkington said one tug at the waist of his top sold the girl .
Netflix picked up the untitled series in August 2017, named it in February 2018, and dropped all eight episodes on 24 August 2018. New Pictures produced. Farren Blackburn directed six of eight. Pearce played Halvorson, the professor running Sanctum on a Norwegian fjord. Groundsell, then 20, and Ascott carried June and Harry, the runaway couple from Yorkshire , 
, .
They shot Skipton, London, and a tiny island off Bergen. Producer Elaine Pyke said they looked at Scotland as a Norway stand-in, then went there and decided nowhere else would do, even in terrible weather . Groundsell told Teen Vogue the Norway block was five weeks with no Wi-Fi and no phone signal. "What you see in the show is exactly what it looked like" .
Elkington also passed on a local story she flagged as probably urban myth. Two brothers owned the island houses. A third killed their mother there. They could not sell, so they rented to film crews. "It's basically haunted by family tragedy, which we've channelled!" . Treat that as rumor. She did.
Groundsell framed the shifting as a fight for a body. "These women shape-shifters are losing control of their bodies," she told Teen Vogue, "and that feels very appropriate for this discussion that's happening all over the world about women's independence and our right to our autonomy" . Pearce, at TCA, said Halvorson had something bigger than he could handle and did not know what he was capable of .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en4ECRmZzqM
The finale put Harry in the same catatonic trap that had wrecked his father. Elkington said they had that last image from the first pitch to a production company. Past season one they had no endpoint. "We're not going to lie to you. We've got nothing!" . Netflix left it there. The official trailer is still on YouTube if you want the romance they sold .
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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