If I hadn’t been out here in L.A. for the last week and a half, you would’ve seen my review of the first volume of “Skins” on DVD, but when it finally does make it onto Bullz-Eye, you can count on it being a rave. I’ve groused on many occasions about the portrayal of American teenagers on television, how it always feel so terribly unreal and thereby presents a version of reality that they feel obliged to live up to. In the case of “Skins,” however, I’m torn by what I’m seeing: on one hand, there’s no denying that it feels really, really real, but, indeed, it’s so real that, unlike “Gossip Girl,” it makes me go, “Oh, my God, maybe this really is what my daughter’s going to be doing when she gets to be a teenager.”
(For what it’s worth, I’ve checked with my sources in the UK – hi, Claire! – and I’m assured that the Brit teen experience is far wilder than the US teen experience, so I’m feeling at least a little bit better about it.)
Those who’ve watched the first two series of “Skins” have been a little bit twitchy about the news that the father-and-son creators of the show, Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain, are basically doing away with the entire cast of kids – except for Effy and Pandora – and starting fresh with a whole new bunch of young’uns.
“We feel like…each cast has a kind of two-year life span, mainly because we are mostly interested in the ages of 16 to 18,” said Brittain. “That’s the format of the show. We felt that, looking at shows that have been before, like ‘Dawson’s Creek’ and ‘The O.C.,’ they tend to go downhill a little bit when the characters all go off to college or a university because, you know, then you have to contrive convenient endless ways to get them to meet up again. They’re always coming home for a party or something like that. Also, we sort of felt like, in the first series, we took the characters quite a long way and sort of took them to their conclusions, really. So any more of those original cast would be, you know, not needed.”
