11.03.2009

Skins: The Second Series


Evertbody get in the misery pile!


Skins, a British show which airs this side of the pond on BBC America, is of what is probably my least favorite genre - the teen soap opera. So of course it was not through my own agency that I began watching it, but via the Kleinette, who was obsessing over the first series (read: season) when we first began dating. I watched mostly through osmosis, interested more in the fascinating female creature I was just then getting to know, but I picked up on the general arc of the plot and characters and a sense of the show's style.

Flash-forward to late this summer, when the Kleinette and I have fast become rapidly comfortable being rather domestic together. She begins taping and watching what we would later figure out was the third series, with a new set of characters; I watch with more interest. By the end, my curiousity is officially piqued. And a quick Googling reveals that we have, in fact, skipped the entire second series, a continuation of the first. A situation easily remedied by Netflix. And I learned that, yes, the first and third series of Skins are well-mounted, well-paced, mostly enjoyable teen fluff that frankly demolishes most of its American counterparts - but they pale when compared to the second series.


That the DVDs' menus are all set to Radiohead's "Nude" should have been a hint; setting a tone of beautiful despair, the second series of Skins is a paean to the "quiet desperation" of lower-class English life, a tone poem dedicated to those born and entrapped there, fumbling through attempts at happiness that tend only to exacerbate the pain. It's, dare-I-say, a masterpiece of misery. Beginning with a resurrection and ending with a funeral, it's built on death, literal and figurative, infused with metaphors of Christ and Moses, and wild with music and light. But it never shies away from life's hardest rule - actions have consequences - and makes sure that any fleeting, bittersweet moments of pleasure are always earned, and often at prices that seem far too high.



Tony (Nicholas Hoult) used to be an asshole, but the kind everyone was drawn to, the kind who effortlessly seems to exert a supernatural control over his girlfriend, Michelle (April Pearson) and best friend, Sid (Mike Bailey), and doesn't mind using that control to satisfy his desires without regard for those he uses to those ends. Then, during his only moment of human emotion, he's hit by a bus. He begins the series alive, miraculously, raised from a coma of undetermined length but a hollow shell of a boy, a pretty face on a soulless and sometimes physically inable body.

As Sid and Michelle begin to spiral outwards into uncharted emotional territory as their center of emotional gravity vanishes, their tragedy seems to ripple outwards: Tony's sister, Effy (Kaya Scodelario), the only witness to the accident, who collapses into depression even as she seems to grow into the sociopathic manipulator her brother no longer can be; Sid's girlfriend Cassie (Hannah Murray), a multiple attempted suicide who continues to innovate new ways to escape even as she seems to take a newfound joy in inflicting misery on others; Chris (Joe Dempsie), a stoner who continues to fail at everything he attempts, and Jal (Larissa Wilson), a musical prodigy who can't help but love him; and two best friends, gay Maxxie (Mitch Hewer) and Muslim Anwar (Dev Patel) are torn apart by desperate, disturbed Sketch (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), who also has her sights on Michelle's role in the school play, Osama! The Musical, a delightfully twisted adaptation of the September 11th terrorist attacks.


It's probably unsurprising by now to note that the play-within-a-show provides a rather apt metaphor for the series itself - violent, wrenching blasts from inscrutible origins destroying lives and sending continuing shockwaves out in unpredictable patterns, all dressed up in a bright pretty package. During the course of Skins' second series families fall apart, friends betray sacred trusts and dreams and hopes are methodically dismantled with maximum cruelty, yet it's all shot like postcards from Bristol, edited like a waking dream and set to pop music that anchors the show in the joie de vivre without which it might be simply too much to bear. At times, in fact, it even inches towards something grander, something about transcending the seas of hedonism and self-destruction to reach for the joy in a life that will never simply hand it off, but must be coerced with maximum force to relinquish every precious ounce of happiness.

Brilliantly relishing the ambiguity of the fate of its survivors, the second series of Skins is a brutal and cathartic experience that, frankly, the Kleiner was wholly unprepared for. He's still surprised that, weeks after its completion, it remains undigested, a lump in my throat that won't be swallowed. Consider this an enthusiastic recommendation to those who feel, for whatever inscrutable reason, that they're suffering from a dearth of crushing melancholy and sorrow. Here's hoping MTV takes this route when they produce the American version; a positive sign is that it's being shot in Baltimore, the setting of another modern television masterpiece of urban fatalism and despair.

Let it not be said I'm exaggerating the case here - anyone else seen Skins? I'm always glad to hear other opinions.
-the Kleiner

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