Unfortunately, one of the things that made season one feel so rich was how the audience was able to fill in details of these characters lives due to their interactions not only with one another, but also with their parents, to the degree that even when one character suffered the complete absence of parental figures, that absence was felt (resulting in one of the best episodes of the series). As bad as it when other teen shows have their characters stop acting like teens and start acting like younger soap opera characters, you can at least understand that it comes as a result of having actors in their late twenties portraying their fifth year of high school. With Skins, they had actual teens playing characters that have only existed for nine episodes prior to the second season's premiere. Surely there was still plenty of real teen stories to tell before they moved on?
I'm only guessing here, but I think part of the problem was that series creators Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain turned over more writing duties to their young staff. Whereas in season one, they relied on a young writing staff to help flesh out their characters, lending them an air of authenticity, in the second season, they turned over more plotting duties to their young staff. The problem is while teens know better than anyone how they talk, dress, or act, they lack the perspective to really understand how they think. Every teen thinks that they're older and more mature than they actually are, and wish adults would treat them that way (this is a tend that continues to about your mid-twenties, after which people generally think of themselves as younger than they actually are). That's what this season felt like: a bunch of kids play acting at being older than they are, leading to dramatically cliché situations that betrayed the originality of the first season.
But the biggest problem with the second season was that it simply wasn't that much fun. The first season was a much better combination of drama and comedy, with the biggest pleasure coming from the interactions between the core teen characters. With the second season, most of the stories tore the characters apart, rather than allowed them to play off of one another. This problem is exasperated by what used to be a series strength: each episode is presented from the perspective of one character (sometimes two, as in the case of season opener "Tony and Maxxie"). Because the characters didn't interact as much as they did in the season before, what would happen is a big dramatic shift would occur in an episode to the feature character, and then the thread would disappear for awhile as the next episode focused on the next character.
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