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.