Skins Seasons 1 & 2

Hi! I'm mumblingmaya, and I'm a Skins late bloomer.

I first heard of it in The Last Airbender forums, where it was being used as proof of Dev Patel's comedic skills.

A friend later started raving about it and lent me a copy of Seasons 1 and 2.

After watching the first episodes and reading Wikipedia articles on it, I found that it also starred Nicolas Hoult of About a Boy fame.

Skins 1 and 2 tells the story of friends Tony (Hoult), Sid, Michelle, Cassie, Jal, Chris, Maxxie, and Anwar (Patel) as college (our equivalent of high school) seniors as they deal with sex, drugs, racism, homosexuality, religion, street violence, family crises and final exams.

I was warned it would be depressing, and in some episodes, it was. But I didn't find myself slashing my wrists or crying after. (I think films on ennui would do that to me.)

There's something about the British treatment of sex and violence, that I can't put my finger on. I think people would be shocked to find how such things among British teens are explicitly and grittily shown here.

You wouldn't find full frontal exposures of teenagers so commonplace and regular elsewhere (most teen dramas I know like to tease people). I don't think all these controversial things are done tritely. They're in your face, but they're not just because some teen queen's rival got invited to some sorority and she didn't.

No─I like how 17-year-old Anwar's being a Muslim clashes with his best friend Maxxie's homosexuality. I like how Tony is shown fucking his hot lady-Animus to confront his inner demons, or that Jal experiences racism at school even if her father is a black rap king. And that the adults are crazy, but aren't all that bad.

If the under-21-year-old writers of Skins could be accused of anything inappropriate or resembling selling-out, IMHO, it's that they pushed the bounderies of a television show for, by and about teens because they were curious of their limits, which is, well, what teens and angsty early 20-somethings often do.

Skins 1 gets an 8.5 /10 for making Maxxie and Anwar secondary. Watch out for the last episode.
Skins 2 gets a 9/10 for exploring the other characters and for featuring Vampire Weekend.

And it gets an NC-17 rating too.

Image from IMDB.