Will, Jay, Neil and Simon are getting back into the yellow Fiat. They are also now middle-aged men.
Netflix has begun production on The Inbetweeners 3 in the UK, bringing Simon Bird, James Buckley, Blake Harrison and Joe Thomas back alongside creators Damon Beesley and Iain Morris, who will write and direct the film.
That is enough nostalgia to make an entire generation hear Jay Cartwright lying in the distance. But the most interesting thing about this reunion was said 15 years ago: Morris revealed that they had once tried writing the characters older. It did not work. They âjust sounded offensiveâ.
The creators already tried making them older
That 2011 Guardian interview gets straight to why The Inbetweeners worked. Will, Jay, Neil and Simon were awful in ways teenagers frequently are.
They lied about sex. They misunderstood women. They overestimated their social importance. They said things they barely understood, then watched life punish them with almost mathematical precision.
The audience was never supposed to think Jay was cool. The joke was the crater between Jayâs self-image and observable reality.
Morris explained that an early conception with older characters simply became nastier. Adolescence gave the behaviour context: these were inexperienced boys trying on versions of adulthood and getting almost all of them wrong.
A man in his forties repeating the same material has had considerably longer to know better. That sounds like a problem. It may also be the entire movie.
Jay cannot still be 18 in his own head without consequences
The worst version of The Inbetweeners 3 would behave as though everybody spent the last decade in cryogenic storage. Put the lads somewhere sunny. Give Jay an impossible sex story. Make Simon panic over a woman. Have Will become indignant. Let Neil misunderstand a sentence. Roll credits.
People would still watch. They might even enjoy themselves. But nostalgia alone would waste what ageing these characters can do.
A middle-aged Jay telling the same outrageous lies is no longer simply a boy desperate to impress his friends. It could be the portrait of a man who never learned how to be impressive without lying. A middle-aged Willâs certainty that he is the smartest person present becomes much funnier if adult life has supplied decades of evidence to the contrary.
Simon being anxious is not inherently adolescent. Neither is Neil drifting through catastrophe with inexplicable serenity. Those characteristics can survive. What cannot survive unchanged is the worldâs willingness to treat them as boys.
Being too old for this may be the new joke
The creators have an opportunity to do for men in their thirties and forties what the original series did for teenagers: expose the humiliating distance between the adulthood people imagined and the one they actually built.
That is far richer than trying to recreate sixth form with lower-back pain. A reunion can ask what happens when old friendships survive marriages, jobs, divorces, children, mortgages, loneliness or success.
Those are possibilities, not announced plot details. Netflix has revealed no public story synopsis and no release date. The supporting cast is similarly open: only the four leads have been confirmed, and the absence of other familiar names from the announcement does not mean anyone has been ruled out.
For now, the only safe conclusion is that Will, Jay, Neil and Simon are older. The screenplay should be brave enough to notice.
Australia already has history with these idiots
The Inbetweeners 2 dragged the group to Australia in 2014, turning backpacking, Byron Bay and the travelling-Brit fantasy of Australia into fresh opportunities for humiliation. That film arrived four years after the television series ended. The new one comes 12 years after that.
Twelve years is not a gap you cover with a haircut and one line about somebody being married now. People become different. Or, perhaps more dangerously for these four, they fail to.
That is where The Inbetweeners 3 can justify its existence. It is also why Netflixâs broader September slate matters: POPTOPIC has already noted how the service places reality, prestige and familiar franchises on the same shelf. Recognition gets the click; the movie still needs a reason to exist.
Netflix should make time the joke, not pretend it stopped
Netflix is using the reunion itself as the event. Fair enough. The original series ran only from 2008 to 2010, yet the chemistry between those four characters became large enough to carry two films in 2011 and 2014.
Other recent revivals have understood that nostalgia gets more interesting when time leaves a mark. POPTOPICâs look at Netflixâs expanding Dungeons & Dragons plans showed the same basic pressure: a familiar name can open the door, but different projects still need distinct identities.
The Inbetweeners cannot simply hand the baton to a younger cast. Nobody is asking for Jay Cartwright: The Next Generation. It can, however, acknowledge that the characters have crossed the border the title originally trapped them beside.
They are not in between childhood and adulthood anymore. The new tension is between the men they expected to become and the men who turned up. That could be brutal. It could also be very funny.
Growing up is the one humiliation they never got to avoid
There is a comforting reason audiences like reunions. For two hours, everyone gets to pretend the clock stopped. The actors appear. The old car appears. Someone says the thing you remember. Your brain supplies a decade of missing context and suddenly tomorrowâs responsibilities feel considerably smaller.
The Inbetweeners 3 should resist that comfort just enough to hurt. Its creators understood 15 years ago that age changes these characters. The same behaviour that sounded forgivable from teenagers could simply sound ugly from adults.
So make that change part of the comedy. Let the audience laugh at what survived. Let it notice what should not have.
An Inbetweener at 18 is somebody stuck between being a child and becoming a man. An Inbetweener in middle age may be somebody stuck between the man he thought he would become and the one staring back at him. For Will, Jay, Neil and Simon, that sounds appropriately humiliating.
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