Late Night Chronicles 73: There's Big Trouble In River City

Originally published on Facebook, 2/1/11

While the world's attention has been focused elsewhere, namely on events in Egypt, Tunisia, Tucson, Washington and elsewhere, the Greatest Moral Panic since the pool hall opened in River City has been unfolding before our very eyes. The Parent's Television Council has been issuing angry denunciations and condemnations and MTV has been nervously saying that this particular program doesn't violate any Federal statutes regarding child pornography that it knows about while quietly doing cartwheels where no one can see them at the sheer amount of free publicity their new show is getting.

Yea, verily children, I speak of the devil's playground known as 'Skins.'

It seems like a national tradition here in the United States to get outraged about any given topic and then completely miss where the true target of our outrage should go. Witness the frothing rabies that seems to have taken ahold of outraged parents everywhere with regards to 'Skins:' teenagers drinking, having sex, doing drugs, getting pregnant, spilling their non-Christian, devilish hormones everywhere and sowing the seeds of anarchy and (quite possibly) communism in the minds of America's youth. This tiny, tiny show, buried in the late night slot on MTV's Monday night line-up has apparently inspired fear in the parents of America unseen since Bill Haley and the Comets rocked the world with their riot-inducing (no, really, it did cause riots) hit 'Rock Around The Clock.'

Problem is, kids that the parents of America are once again enraged, but for all the wrong reasons! Sure, I get it- I mean, if I'm a parent of a teenager today and I watch an episode of this show, I'd probably want to ship my kids off to a monastery or nunnery or even both as fast as possible. But the parents of America need to pause in their rage momentarily to realize just a couple of things.

First: this isn't that good of a show. No offense to the creators of Skins, who apparently had to have their hands held to be convinced to ship their gem of a show to the warm, scummy embrace of MTV, but American television is littered with subpar remakes of British television shows which makes having one of them succeed a long shot, even at the best of times.

Second: this isn't a remake, it's a pale, pale, Canadian clone of the original. It's important to note that in the British version of 'Skins' the kids are in Sixth Form College, that hazy place between the end of secondary school and the start of University proper. While no one could say that the British gang is all grown up, they're not really high schoolers any more either- at least not in the American sense. Translating that hazy, post-high school, pre-University moment of a young British person's life to an American teen's life is impossible to do. There is no American equivalent to Sixth Form college and the fact that the American clone of 'Skins' fails to acknowledge that makes the whole thing seem really weird.

The American High School has it's traditional place in our cultural zeitgeist mainly due to the movies of John Hughes. You think 'high school' and the prototypical social structure of jock-geek-cheerleader-goth springs to mind. People aren't necessarily down with the whole gay and lesbian thing in this country either. There's Prom, Homecoming, football, even issues of race that are more palpable in America and perhaps- less palpable in Britain- and all of these things and more are quintessential to the American teen experience and all of them are ignored by the American version of 'Skins.'

I've thought a lot about it and a decent remake of 'Skins' should have really been set in the Twin Cities- in the heart of the Midwest, yet close enough to the diversity and size of major urban area to let the writers explore all kinds of issues for the characters to wrestle with. Plus, there's the endearing regional accent as well- part of what I love about the British version of 'Skins' is the Bristol twang and West Country burr that shows up from time to time throughout the show- really, it should be an integral part of any remake.

So yes, there's nudity, drinking, sex and drug dealing and taking all wrapped up in a half hour of MTV's subpar, shit-tastic programming. But parents of American you should take a breath: this show has very little basis in reality that American teens face today. It's a clone of a truly brilliant show that everyone should really watch if they have Netflix instant- and stick with it, the horror at the amoral first 20 minutes of the pilot episode quickly fade to real, brutal discussions about the horrors and difficulties of growing up and the things teens have to wrestle with- some of them very universal.

If you're going to be outraged about anything, be outraged at MTV's terrible programming- that seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with music at all. Whatever happened to music videos?