Skins Season 4

About a year ago a friend of mine recommended the British high school drama Skins to me. He told me it got rid of all the typical high school cliches in film and television and was a compelling groundbreaking show. He mentioned that they didn't present drug use and sex as taboo, but as facts of life without moralizing; I was intrigued. I pictured a version of Freaks and Geeks where they focused on the cool kids with a little less humour and a little more drama. That is not what I got. I got The OC with british actors who actually looked 17-18 instead of being 25 year olds playing high schoolers.

The above description isn't all that bad it wasn't the magnum opus I was expecting, but it could be a fun compelling diversion and considering I have watched 7 seasons of 24 and am still watching new episodes of Entourage Skins was at times a pleasant addition to my TV cycle. Skins is a mercurial show that managed to occasionally create nice moments between characters that captured high school in a real way only to ruin them with soap opera cliches. Characters sleeping with teachers, 14 year olds performing sexual espionage, characters dying or getting terminally every month. In the second season one of the characters father a archetypal middle-aged blue collar man who wishes his life worked out differently, finally confronts his more successful family members and gets the redemption he wanted his whole life. It is a nice real albeit slightly melodramatic character driven moment that lets the audience empathize with the characters. However Skins the writers aren't content with just slight melodrama so either due to sadism or an addiction to melodrama the newly redeemed father dies from a severe case of Deus Ex Machinas. I was literally angry when watching this, because they just ruined a nice relatively grounded moment so they could create a cliffhanger that didn't really lead anywhere.

A common theme in a lot of high school shows is that adults are not infallible, they are real flawed people, which makes solving the existential crisis that is high school even harder for our protagonists. Skins does this, but it takes out it to such an extreme that we the only people that can sympathize with the characters are popular teenage girls. I doubt any audience member thinks boy it must suck to be a precocious teenager in a world full of adults who you are much more talented then. You aren't supposed to sympathize with the characters, you are supposed to envy them, which really enforces the oldest high school stereotype ever, you want to be one of the cool kids. Frankly I think the creators of the show, wish they were the cool kids in high school and are now trying live vicariously through these characters and become cool dads. In reality they are helping create a generation of people who are envy self-absorbed egotists.

Despite all of this I still watched the first three seasons of the show. Some of this was because I had a couple of long train rides and both seasons on my computers and because I like finishing everything I start. However on some level I did like the show, it was good enough to make me want to watch the next episodes out of general curiosity while my critical rage merely simmered and it has enough attractive high school girls that I didn't feel like it was a complete waste of time (though it did make me feel a little creepy), until I started season 4.

Skins has a young writing staff, an average age of 21, which explains a lot of the awful plotting and the reductive attitudes toward all adults. However they also have different directors for a lot of episodes and it seems as if each director is trying to show off as many tricks as possible. Season 4 opens with a longshot of an unknown girl walking through a club before she kills herself by jumping off the balcony into the middle of a dance floor, which seemed like an idea some director had so he could show off his limited technical process. After this tragedy the characters finally come to the conclusion that there maybe consequences to using drugs, but of course the characters aren't responsible for their actions (with one possible exception), it's all the fault of the sketchy clubowner for letting 15 year olds into his clubs. One of the show's strength has been it's lack of moralism, however when you decide to do it you need to implicate the characters, when you have validated their actions throughout the series. It is at this point in the episode there is a sex scene with a baptist choir chanting "I believe in your lord" ad nauseam, because there is no better way to juxtapose characters actions with religion then having ironic song lyrics literally screaming at the viewer so they have to understand this trite message. It is at this point of the episode I turned it off and stopped watching the show, likely forever. I just wrote 1000 words about a show I dislike and I don't feel like letting it waste any more of my life, so I am going to end this post as abruptly as I quit the show.