Skins
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Summary
Fun 16+ teen to young adult sitdrama, but way over billed, over played, and over worked. Skins has a number of good points, and none of its flaws are fatal, but many are serious. I kept wanting the show to be interesting, but as the series goes on, it honestly just gets dumber and dumber.
Details and Notes
Too Much
The primary device of the show is the idea that we're peeling back the facade and looking at these kids real lives. Each has their burden... or burdens. Absentee parents are a shared burden. A few of the kids have to take care of their parents as well as themselves. Seems harsh, but even though most of them do cocktails of drugs every weekend, they still pull it enough together to do great in school.
My favorite are the incestuous brother and sister, semi-sociopathic 15 and 18-ish, who coolly manipulate everyone around them for their own amusement. Each has an episode devoted to their coy manipulations.
Churn
Constant churn must be a popular thing because so many shows go for it, but I hate it. Nothing is ever resolved; no question is every answered, just derailed by another question. Will Bobby and Susie resolve their issues and get back together? BAM! Bobbies hit by a bus and forgets everything. Will Bobby get his memory back and remember his love for Susie? BAM! Susie gets a stalker and has other things to worry about. BAM! Bobby remembers and wants to get back with Susie, and so on.
The problem is that the characters never really grow, and the story never really advances. It just churns. So we've got a bunch of interesting characters doing interesting things, fairly well acted and produced, but it all ends up to nothing. It's not episodic, but there's no story either. It's just arbitrary and increasingly increasingly farcical events strung together for no ultimate purpose.
Promises
During the commercial breaks in the show, they do behind the scene interviews and talk about how the show is received and all the great things it does. One of these promises is that it shows kids without patronizing the kids who are the viewing audience.
I suppose the logic is that the kids aren't window dressing in stories that are really about adults. Skins is, however, one of the most patronizing shows I've ever seen because it assumes that a teens normal life is so boring that we have to aggressively remove any semblance of reality and replace it with constant melodrama and farce. These aren't teenagers, these are caricatures playing out melodrama.
This is a show with heart is another unfulfilled promise. There's not enough reality in the show for the show to have any heart. Perhaps the characters are more empathetic to hormone fueled teens who, new research shows, become less empathetic. Maybe the exaggerated characters are needed to bridge this gap.
What's more likely is that it's sensationalism, for it's own sake and because melodrama is always a good cover for weak writing and numbed sensibilities. The show lacks not only a fine touch, but any sense of basic control.
