“Skins,” a new dramedy beginning Sunday on BBC America, starts disagreeably, with a surfeit of self-protective cool. But it becomes more likable over ensuing episodes, as the pace relaxes and the focus turns toward more sympathetic and interesting characters.
Co-created by father and son Bryan Elsley, 47, and Jamie Brittain, almost 23, it comes from E4, a British pay-TV channel, which means that it is as nasty as it wants to be. And within the bounds of a television show about high school students, it wants to be fairly nasty. There is a lot of "bad language," bleeped for basic-cable American ears; a little bit of nudity, pixel-blurred for American eyes; a lot of talk about sex and drugs ("skins" being British slang for rolling papers, but I had to look that up); some acting up under the influence; and general contempt for authority figures and older people, as if to admire youth one must disdain everything that isn't young. Most of the adults here are useless, clueless, corrupt or dangerous.
Not that I have a problem with any of that. Youth has been at war with age since before the old people of today were the young people of yesterday. And while the writing sometimes runs toward the preposterous, these are the very tropes of teen dramaturgy, from "Rumblefish" to "Porky's."
This list of “keywords” associated with “Skins” on the Internet Movie Database gives a partial idea of its concerns: Friendship Between Boys, Male Rear Nudity, Theft, Sex, Boyfriend Girlfriend Relationship, Group Therapy, Drug Dealing, Skinny Dipping, Gay Kiss, College, Kiss, Trampoline, Brother Sister Relationship, Gay Teenager, Teenage Sex, Sickness, Party, Teenage Boy, Teenage Girl, Friendship.
It takes its cues, in a roundabout way, from American teen soaps like "Dawson's Creek" (which is name-checked), but it's more satirical in intent, more grotesque around the edges. (Some of the minor characters could be easily fit into “Little Britain,” where they would be played with greater sympathy.) Because the kids here get up to the sorts of trouble that kids do actually get up to -- but in most television series get up to rarely, and not without a lesson attached -- the show comes on as bold and "realistic." In fact it's a highly romanticized view of teendom that keeps its stars attractive to the target demographic even as their behavior might tempt a viewer outside that demographic to turn a hose on them: "Get off my lawn, you kids!"
