Skins
Street buzz has carried SBS's Skins from an obscure critics pick to huge popularity in the space of
a few weeks.
By Jonathon Rodgers
Hedonism wears hot pants and carries a pocketful of pills in the SBS pearler, Skins
Set in the brick city of Bristol, Skins follows a mob of middle class British teens as they navigate an adolescent universe overloaded with meaning. What’s different about Skins is that it is fueled by all the things too often left out of shows about teenagers: pills, piss, vomit and vodka.
The show’s co-creator Bryan Elsley describes the bright spark that ignited Skins, as one that demanded he “should do something for kids; but not the usual crap. Get rid of the moralising, the pumping rock music that old people seem to think kids like, the fantasy sequences, the wobbly camera work, the middle aged portrayals of emotions, the stupid issue-based stories, the crap voiceovers. Get rid of all that shite and do something funny instead.”
But Elsley hasn’t thrown out all the clichés. Skins features all the teen angst archetypal characters: alpha male Tony, his pretty girlfriend Michelle, his grubby mate Sid, their anorexic friend Cassie.
“I think it doesn’t hold back,” says Mike Bailey (Sid). “Everyone knows the issues about kids, what happens, what they really get up to. Skins just gets straight to the point. It’s been written really well like that.”
While it does sound formulaic, the show’s creators have managed to subvert the adolescent soap structure by giving the characters plenty of complexity and depth. They are completely believable, easy to relate to and very, very funny.
Although the writers wanted to steer away from ‘issues’ drama doesn’t exist without conflict. Skins has all the embarrassment and cynicism of youth tied in with growing up: Chris moves out of home early. Sid and Jal strike trouble with a dealer. Tony climbs the social ladder but slips. Most characters get bashed by local chavs at some point.
In each episode the audience briefly meets one of the character’s parents who invariably prove as messed up as their kids. The parents in Skins aren’t bit players though. The mums and dads in Skins are fallible, but authority figures like teachers, dealers, doctors are just plain surreal. They are alien and stupid.
Scripts with characters this good could have been lost with poor execution, but Skins is chock full of the next generation of young English thesps, led by young British star Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy).
“The important thing is it’s being played by people who are teenagers,” Bailey explains. “A lot of dramas now, you’re looking at 30-year-olds playing 18-year-olds, so they can’t relate to what they’re playing.”
Father and son co-creators Elsley and Jamie Brittain created Skins to be the anthesis of posturing teen dramas of old. The show’s young writers (their average age is 22) have harnessed the kind of dialogue Oscar nominee Juno almost captured.
In last weeks episode, someone got their own back on Tony in a bout of new-rave neo-noir. The show’s poised for a final episode that is everything you could want from quality television like this. It’s not spilling beans to say the episode borrows from PT Anderson a mite.
Skins, Monday 10pm, SBS
Win!
Time Out has five DVDs of Skins: Series One (Madman) to give away. Go to www.timeout.com/sydney