Kids in America
I’m a little surprised this article on the British teen show Skins didn’t once mention the words “gossip” or “girl.” The show was born when a TV producer’s son pointed out the problem with most dramas about teenagers:
“He said that being a teenager, by definition, means behaving badly, having sex, flirting with drink and drugs,” Mr. Elsley said, and all teenage dramas either pretend such things don’t happen or make sure that if they do, “people die as a consequence.”
So Skins, wisely, goes in the opposite direction — it plays the Carla Bruni, if you’ll forgive a geographically faulty metaphor, to Gossip Girl’s Laura Bush.
In the pilot, for example, Tony, the show’s main instigator of drinking and underage sex, takes a break from party planning to try out for the high school chorus. On Gossip Girl, the audition would have been presented as evidence of Tony’s deep-seated hypocricy. You’d hear his voice piping angelically over a montage of flashbacks in which he, say, molested someone in the Campbell Apartment and then drugged Serena to make her miss the SATs.
“Skins,” on the other hand, plays the scene completely straight. As Tony sings “On the Street Where You Live,” all the girls around him start to giggle because they think he’s cute, the point being that they’re right, he IS cute, and he has a nice voice, and generally the world is a better place when we can all just appreciate British guys with dramatic eyebrows singing songs from old musicals without tossing on a ton of subtext about how if you have premarital sex you’ll probably wind up dead.
(This is all particularly refreshing, by the way, if you find the new Gossip Girl ads incredibly irritating. Like, the Parents Television Council thinks you’re bad? Wow, you must be truly wicked — they haven’t been this upset since the third season of Friends.)
