See ya, Skins. It’s been, um, interesting.
On March 21, MTV bid farewell to this British import (at least for the season, and likely forever), bringing to a close one of the strangest, wackiest television sagas this side of V. And we’re just talking about what took place offscreen.
Onscreen, the show was bad enough. Skins, as you recall, centered around teens behaving badly: The show’s protagonists were all about the next high—be it from a drug cocktail, a roll in the hay, a particularly righteous rave or crashing a stolen SUV into a lake. It was a show expressly created, it seemed, to give parents ulcers.
In other words, it looked like it would be a perfect fit for MTV.
And at first, everything went to plan.
MTV promoted Skins relentlessly, promising viewers an experience unlike anything they’d seen before (unless, of course, they’d seen the British original). Conservative watchdog groups were predictably outraged by its alleged content. The Parents Television Council called Skins “the most dangerous television program [for children] ever”— a statement that surely left some MTV execs weeping … for joy. I mean, it’s not like the network goes after the familial discernment crowd, right?
Right out of the gate, Skins pulled in 3.3 million viewers—not Jersey Shore numbers, but still impressive. It looked like MTV had a controversial hit on its hands.
But then things started to unravel. First came whispers of child pornography (sparked when one under-18 cast member exposed his rear to the camera in episode 3). The PTC asked its supporters to boycott not the show, but its advertisers … and those advertisers melted away like mom-and-pop hardware stores.
Most importantly, people just stopped watching. Episode 2 attracted less than half the viewers the premiere did, and things went downhill from there. By the time the show finally and mercifully shut down, the only folks who cared anymore were—well, conservative and/or Christian groups like the PTC and Plugged In.
Ah, the irony.
So why did Skins tank? The biggest reason, says Entertainment Weekly’s Hillary Busis, is simple: “The show is just not very good.” She adds:
While watching [the season finale] “Eura,” I wasn’t shocked by the amount of skin on display. Instead, I was fighting to keep my eyes open through scene after scene of pretty, blank-faced young people staring meaningfully at each other and speaking each of their lines in the same affect-less tone. In their rush to make something controversial and zeitgeisty, MTV forgot to create characters with personality—and all the lurid storylines in the world can’t make a series successful if viewers can’t be bothered to care about the people they’re watching.
Which kinda riffs off what Plugged In and parents all over the world have been saying for years: Character truly does count—in more ways than one.
When we reviewed Skins back when it looked like it might be a runaway hit, we suggested that MTV might have misjudged its audience:
It depicts adults as moronic and ineffectual, even though polls suggest that teens actually see the adults in their lives as positive influences and "family" as paramount. And while the kids on Skins live for the next party, today's youth are working harder than ever at school and plotting out their college course load and future careers. Studies suggest that for real teens sexual promiscuity and overall drug use may have actually gone down over the last decade, while responsibility and charity have gone up.
The apparent demise of Skins won’t be a lasting victory for fans of entertainment discernment. Let’s face it: Sex and sensationalism still sell. But it does suggest that there’s gotta be something underneath the surface—a heart, a soul, a mind—to make something more enduring. It’s gotta be more than Skins deep.
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