The Tripods (television series)

I first heard of the Tripods stuff because when I was a kid they had a comic about it in Boy’s Life.  I don’t know where I got a copy of the magazine from, but I assumed the comic was some sort of War of the Worlds lift & I loved Killraven which was also a War of the Worlds lift.  I never found out anything more about it.  Then I was nosing around for some british sci-fi television shows & I found they had a program based on the same books as the comic strip.
So this television show… I guess it’s for kids… but not in subject matter.  The storyline is that aliens have taken over & humans are functioning as an agrarian society & borderline slave race.  The aliens take teenagers & install some technology to keep them from having rebellious thoughts & keep them docile the rest of their life.  So there’s a couple kids who are suspicious of this & run away & have adventures & over the course of a year or so become bona fide revolutionaries.  There is some kind of weird unexpressed idea behind the series that love/sex domesticates a person & keeps them from fulfilling their potential.  It kind of feels like a post-apocalyptic Lord of the Rings coming of age thing.  The acting quality is along the lines of the original Degrassi & most of the time there aren’t any actual special effects to speak of.  The intro to it is some really weird ominous computer animation that is interesting, but not at all indicative of the series.  As teen sci-fi goes you could do a lot worse.  I kinda liked that a lot of the characters were kind of annoying & endearing at the same time.