Skins: An exercise in ‘child porn’?

It may be the most effecations campaign for a TV show in history, said Matt Zoller Seitz in Salon.com. MTV’s scandalous new series, Skins, follows the exploits of a group of rebellious working-class Baltimore teens, who combat their teen angst by downingtive public-rel shots of vodka, consuming “massive amounts” of marijuana and pills, and jumping into bed with each other at a moment’s notice—all “under the noses of clueless and/or ineffectual parents and teachers.” The Parents Television Council has already called Skins “the most dangerous television show for children that we have ever seen,” and Viacom, which owns MTV, ordered producers to “tone down” the groping, heavy breathing, and masturbation scenes. Outraged members of the U.S. Senate panicked MTV executives by suggesting that certain scenes, such as one in which a 17-year-old boy walks naked down the street with an erection, might break federal child-pornography laws. Sure enough, said Frazier Moore in the Associated Press, the show’s first episode drew 3.3 million viewers—1.2 million under 18. With publicity like this, the series “has nowhere to go but up.”

Skins may be crass, said Jace Lacob in TheDailyBeast.com, but “it’s not kiddie porn.” Even in the most sexually charged scenes, the camera steers well clear of “nude genitalia or breasts.” Still, this is an incredibly trashy and “repugnant” viewing experience, said Hank Stuever in The Washington Post. In an attempt to be more “authentic,” Skins relies on writers in their late teens and early 20s, who depict the lives of “hardened kids” with no perspective whatsoever. “I usually roll my eyes” at the outrage of the Parents Television Council, but this is the kind of show “for which ‘off’ buttons are made.”

If only it were that easy, said David Carr in The New York Times. My 14-year-old daughter tells me that Skins is already the talk of her school. What worries me is that the underage characters in the show seem to pay not the slightest consequence for drinking, drugging, or promiscuity; it’s all one big joke. Even when a group of teens steals an SUV and drives it into a river, “everyone bobs to the surface with a smile.” Grand theft auto—what a blast! Maybe, if it had any sense of responsibility, MTV could have at least worked into the plots some indication of “what happens when kids do only want they want.”

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