Let's talk about teenagers and television. As everyone knows, the internet was the technological orgasm that wetted the bedsheets of the planet with such gifts as knowledge, communication and lolcats, and this means that the generation gap is widening farther than goatse's anus. And as everyone also knows, the majority of the big cultural institutions of the country aren't run by teenagers but by boring, bespectacled grownups who consider Metallica subversive and shocking listening. Combine the two together and you get one constant truth - teenagers are never depicted correctly in television. I think I might've mentioned before in what I wrote about Kids that, being a teenager, I'm constantly feeling underrepresented by those fogeyed adults who unfortunately are in power of everything. Skins will always remain a flagship example of this. And there's nothing worse for an existentially challenged, confused, naive and fatally introspective teenager than to feel like you're part of the age group that no one really understands, not even yourself. For the unpopular outcasts at state schools around the country, the show might as well come with the number of the Samaritans. It's easy to take away from Skins the idea that if you're not a reckless fuckwit with zero integrity, then you deserve nothing but to be mocked.
As much as I can complain about this gargantuan pit of sewage, I can't deny that it made waves. Big, shitty brown waves. It was a smash. It hit the demographic with a headshot. It didn't need to focus on character or plot development, or any kind of, well, meaning or purpose. It sold simply on the basis of sex, drugs and recklessness. After all, to an aimless teenager the abstract concept of 'cool' is more appealing than junk to a junky. Sex, drugs and doing things that the establishment would prefer you didn't - the simple ways into the average young depressive's heart. Skins has all the intent and execution of internet porn. Just replace hardcore sex with things that disconnected teenagers wished their lives consisted of. The first casting call was a checklist of stereotypes. The stereotypes were so stereotyped that the word 'stereotype' seemed about as obvious as saying 'person'. Two of my favourite characters of note in this inspiration jamboree were Anwar and Maxxie, AKA the muslim and the gay. I waited, and waited, and was shocked to discover that these nouns were the total extent of these characters' story arcs. The ideas session between the scriptwriters were clearly 'cocky womaniser', 'shy nerd', 'hot girl', 'crazy girl', 'sarcastic girl', 'gay' and 'muslim'. And they all play accordingly. Surprisingly, the most decent characterisation I found was with Chris, no matter how much he made me want to rip off his head and ram it up his arse. While he was a dickhead, at least he kinda sorta felt like more than just a tacked-on typicality of established teenage society.
The first two series of Skins, while positively overflowing with bullshit from beginning to end, were nonetheless ultimately... not all bad. In the grand scheme of things, at least. It all began as the insultingly superficial adolescent circlejerk that its aggressive precursory advertising campaign suggested it would be, and though it never even came close to reaching the status of cultural milestone that it and the out-of-touch adult media believed it to be, it wasn't a total abomination, and there were only fleeting moments when I felt like eviscerating myself with my own fingernails. It even had little splashes of heart. Rare glimpses of intellect. There were little moments where it actually became substance over style. Of course, I didn't come to realise this until the first 'generation' ceased and the third series began, opening up a brand new generation of punchable fucktards onto the screens of televisions and the small talk of schools nationwide. While the first two series were, like I said before, at the very most not totally bad, the second generation stands proud as the true icon of everything that fucking sucks about the actual generation I'm having to grow up in.
You can see it all in the first seven vomit-inducing minutes, the absolute worst footage of anything ever that I have ever seen, ever. Hit it up on YouTube and we can all wince along together. Skateboards, spliffs, dumb indie fashion, mockney shitheads. The brilliance of Fucked Up becomes the sound of the show's producers clamouring for credibility. The way they talk about weed is so disconnected and almost laughably sheltered. Then there's a stop to laugh at the socially awkward nerd. LOL. He even knocks over a policeman on a bike, causing my psyche to scream what is this, the 1950s? And it just gets worse. And worse. The entire rest of the series reads like the lamest kid at college writing fanfiction of his own otherwise dull and pathetic life. These people do not act like human beings. They do not resemble people. Unless there's some kind of unfathomable artistic point to be made, TV dramas are generally character-driven. Here, the characters are unfeeling bags of sand moved around from one ridiculous situation to the next. It's the teenage equivalent of exploitation cinema, except it's even worse. The exploitation of Skins isn't sex, or violence - it's the constructed dream world - a world of faux-rebellious fantasy where everyone's independent and sexy - intended to prey upon the directionless lack of identity and need for self-importance that is the unspoken essence of the teenage years.
But while this is all well and good, and I can talk about superficiality and stereotypes until the end of time, there's one other part of Skins that doesn't so much annoy me as confuse me. The first series started off dumb, flashy and pretty much unassuming in its lack of invention, but by the time the second series really goes into throttle, everything stops being dumb and starts going apeshit. And dark. Sometimes the crappy jokes lie side by side with melodramatic doom and gloom. The episode 'Sketch', which was actually kinda cool in that it didn't follow a single main character, instead focusing on a peripheral character who they foolishly brought back again, was half-decent in its bleakness. Then there's the episode that's supposedly all about Jungian metaphors. Incest! Death! Peter Capaldi being Scottish and awesome! Then more death! It's like what the hell happened? Even the second generation went totally nuts, as if they could make their collection of wooden characters jumble around chaotically enough to give at least some small semblance of fascinating activity. For a show that made headlines for telling it like it is about what kids in the UK are like nowadays, it sure likes to put its balls to the wall for the actual majority of its content.
Skins is evil. There's no doubt about it. It's exploiting my generational brethren. It's not universally adored, but it was enough of a success to warrant yet another forthcoming series, not to mention the seriously depressing American jackoffathon that's getting everyone's attention. I even heard a film was in the works, which I can't see happening. What could it possibly involve except putting the characters in space or something? The only possible saviour, the only thing keeping me from distrusting the older generation for the rest of my time as one of the up-and-comings, is Channel 4's other crack of the youth whip, Misfits. While Skins is bullshit over substance as the entire core of its being, Misfits is a startlingly realistic portrayal of teenagers, especially for a show about superpowers. I'm actually stoked on its return, hopefully very soon this year. As for Skins? Well, my years as a literal teenager are slipping away from me pretty quickly. Soon it's never gonna rile me up like it does. To close: Pandora = best character, Cook = worst character in anything ever. I'd love to set his retarded gaping-grin face on fire.
