Skins (US)

What keeps it from being exploitative--just--is the sense that these kids know such dangerous exhilaration won't, can't, lead to the happiness they're looking for. [31 Jan 2011, p.40]

The episode feels contrived, as the characters are introduced and try too hard to prove their anarchic cool. The next three episodes, though, are surprisingly thoughtful and even a little punk poetic.

For all its cheekiness and raunch, Skins has more sweetness than snarky teen soaps like Gossip Girl.

Skins is, alas, many types of teen drama to many types of teens--a raunchy good time and an Afterschool Special on The Way Youth Live Now rolled into one. It's a viewing experience akin to going to a coke party only to be given a lecture. Where's the fun in that?

Plopped down in Baltimore, the loose-living adolescents in MTV's seemingly line-for-line version don't actually feel American, no matter what their accents are, and the plots that always struck me as more teen movie than teen reality seem no more realistic than, say, "Gossip Girl."

The scripts are nearly line-for-line copies of the Brit version. But the scenes are over the top, the kids are too good-looking and seem to have spent too much time at acting camp.

Surely, there are talented American writers not long out of their teens who could have helped craft a new group of characters and stories that reflected their own experiences - and with enough sex and drugs and mayhem to please MTV's need for extra attention.