David Farnor | On 25, Aug 2025

“It’s a very different world you kids have to navigate,” admits Jules (Richard Coyle) to his son, Charlie, partway through The Gathering. Channel 4’s drama dives headfirst into that world, joining dramas such as Adolescence in their timely attempts to help more people understand the challenges young people today are navigating. What’s different about this series from novelist Helen Walsh, though, is that it also turns its gaze to the parents and their role in all this.

We begin with the aftermath of a beach rave on the Wirral, before skipping back to follow the events leading up to it. Someone was attacked and what becomes clear over the weeks preceding the gathering isn’t there’s an obvious person to be suspicious of, just an endless string of potential triggers from almost everyone in the community.

Our primary concerns are Kelly (Eva Morgan), a promising young gymnast who has found a sense of freedom in free-running secretly alongside her formal athletic aspirations, and Jessica (Sadie Soverall), a fellow gymnast, which means she’s as much a friend as a rival. Looking after them respectively are Paul (Warren Brown), Kelly’s widower father who works hard to provide for her, and Natalie (Vinette Robinson), Jessica’s single mother who doesn’t shy away from putting expectations and pressure on her daughter. As for Jules, he’s a high-flying solicitor who doesn’t realise that Charlie is gay, but is willing to try anything to be cool with the younger generation, including sharing his drugs.

It’s great to see a focus on the adults as much as the kids, and it immediately becomes clear that their lives are far from straightforward or easy. Vinette Robinson is brilliant as the scene-stealing Natalie, with a chaotic personal life that only pushes her further into a toxic cycle of behaviour that hurts everyone around her – including trying to sabotage Kelly’s position on the gymnastics team. That adds layers of complexity to an already messy web, and Eva Morgan and Sadie Soverall are superb at capturing the confusion and vulnerability that they feel at the heart of the maze.

Of course, boys come into the mix too: there’s the confident street runner Adam (Sonny Walker), who is flirting with Jessica in a way that his younger half-brother envies, and there’s Bazi (excellent newcomer Luca Kamleh-Chapman), a refugee from Syria who is Kelly’s boyfriend – and lures her into the thrilling, but dangerous, world of parkour.

The result is a simmering cauldron of class tensions, social pressures, teenage romance and competitive sports, which amplifies the underlying risks of cyber-bullying and social media. As the six episodes jump back and forward in time and piece together the fragments of his broken community, the result is a slow-paced but compelling – and well acted – examination of the modern world. It leaves you wondering, as all parents inevitably do, whether their actions are helping or hindering.

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