A little over a month ago, I used this space to sing the praises of the first season of this show. At the time, I remarked on how it was surprisingly intelligent for what seemed like exploitive teen melodrama at first glance. And since I took it upon myself to highly recommend the series to anyone with even a passing affection for the teen drama genre, I felt it was only right to come back and write about how the next ten episodes shaped up. In that spirit, not only will this review be devoid of spoilers for season two, it'll also be devoid of spoilers from season one.
Because it's time to damper whatever enthusiasm my earlier review may have caused. Many of the things I loved about the first nine episodes were absent in the next ten, to the degree that if this is how the show was originally like, I wouldn't have given it a second thought. In many ways, Skins became the show it always presented itself as, without the surprising intelligence that made it something more.
From the beginning, the show flaunted its "adult" themes not usually found in a teen show, with the kids drinking, doing drugs, and having sex. What made it special was how it presented these themes from a teen perspective, without coming off moralistic or exploitive. This season was slightly more exploitive, but the bigger issue was that the stories felt more adult this year, and not just "adult". Usually, "adult" is a euphemism for content people don't want kids to see, but in this instance, the problem wasn't that the series had too much sex (although they may have gone a bit overboard at times with that), but that these kids who were finishing up (the British equivalent of) high school were suddenly burdened with adult concerns.
This often happens on teen shows, when creators decide that realities of being a teen such as having to go to school, not having a lot of money, and living under their parents' roof become a hassle to the stories they want to tell, and suddenly their teen characters are behave like little adults. What had set this show apart in its first season was that its teens acting like teens. True, the adult figures in their lives were often developed only slightly better than the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons, but they existed as elements of their lives, even if they merely served as obstacles. As season two developed, the parental figures were pushed even further into the periphery, or completely eliminated altogether, having the kids inexplicably living on their own, somehow paying for things like rent, food, transcontinental flights, all without any discernible means of income.
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