The Institute

The core story centers on children with supernatural abilities escaping torture, which is a classic Stephen King trope. However, the adaptation adds a romantic lesbian hookup between Michelle and Kate to initiate the conspiracy subplot. Furthermore, creators Jack Bender and Benjamin Cavell explicitly framed the kids' rebellion as an allegory for modern youth activism, citing the Parkland school shooting survivors as their primary inspiration for how the children organize and fight back.

The show's critique of the government and the shadowy "Institute" is a standard sci-fi trope of institutional abuse (like Stranger Things or Firestarter). However, it modernizes this critique by depicting local authority figures as either highly bumbling, corrupt, or compromised, while framing the corporate/state-backed scientists as sociopathic torturers who claim to be "saving the world." It remains mostly a classic thriller setup, without heavy-handed critiques of Christianity or traditional family units.

While the show keeps many of the core characters close to their book descriptions (such as Kalisha being black), the writers made a significant, identity-driven departure by adding a tragic lesbian relationship between snatch team leader Michelle and journalist Kate in Episode 1. In the book, this subplot does not exist, and its addition serves to inject an explicit queer relationship and subsequent betrayal into the story, which carries elevated "woke" weight.

The show received noticeable backlash from conservative and anti-woke viewers on platforms like Reddit and Rotten Tomatoes. Viewers complained about the inclusion of a "peak woke" monologue by a Somali Muslim refugee in Episode 2. Others criticized the show's decision to insert an explicit, highly sexualized lesbian hookup in the very first episode as unnecessary identity-signaling that departed from Stephen King's source material.

The creative team behind the series has a historically low-to-moderate woke footprint. Creator Benjamin Cavell holds a score of 15, and veteran director Jack Bender is at 6. While Stephen King (32) is a vocal critic of conservative politics on social media, his fiction writing generally avoids modern identity-politics framing, and the rest of the writing team has neutral-to-mild records regarding activist or social justice advocacy.