MTV gives the kiss-off to its controversial teen drama 'Skins'

MTV is shedding its "Skins."     

The widely criticized, not-highly rated teen drama based on a hit British series will not return for a second season, the cable network announced Thursday afternoon.

"'Skins' is a global television phenomenon that, unfortunately, didn't connect with a U.S. audience as much as we had hoped," MTV said in a statement. "We admire the work that the series' creator Bryan Elsley did in adapting the show for MTV, and appreciate the core audience that embraced it."

"Skins" was enveloped in controversy this year, when some critics compared it to child pornography for its frank treatment of teen sexuality. Several major advertisers were scared away after the Parents Television Council targeted the series. Elsey told The Times that his show was "the opposite of pornography."

The premiere drew a respectable 3.3 million viewers, according to the Nielsen Co. But the audience soon drifted away, with the finale logging just 1.2 million viewers. Part of the problem: Because of its TV-MA rating for mature content, MTV was restricted to airing the series after 10 p.m., which limited repeats and made it harder to hook viewers on the show.

The failure complicates MTV's ongoing efforts to find a scripted series that can connect with its core youth demographic. The channel earns far more attention for its reality offerings such as "Jersey Shore" and "16 and Pregnant." However, MTV just drew strong numbers for its premiere of "Teen Wolf" and has six more scripted series on deck.

Trackers, what do you think of "Skins" getting cut?

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Behind the advertiser boycott

Recap of the finale

— Scott Collins (twitter.com/scottcollinsLAT)

Photo: Daniel Flaherty, left, and Britne Oldford in "Skins." Credit: Jason Nocito/MTV. 

 

 

 

'Skins' recap: 'I hope we live to tell the tale'

The first -- and perhaps only -- season of MTV's "Skins" ended as it began, with its most mysterious character, Eura (Eleanor Zichy). Tony's younger sister, who made only a few brief appearances in the previous nine episodes, seems to embody everything dark and creepy about the show: Not only does she tend to bring a parental nightmare of a party everywhere she goes (vomit, vandalism, staying out till it's time to wake up for school), but she is also completely, unsettlingly silent.

Well before Eura utters a single syllable, we learn what Tony's been up to since Michelle exiled him from the clique: absolutely nothing. He's been lying in bed, lamenting his fate. Oh, and he's been writing a cocky love letter ("Don't say you didn't want me") to Tea, which Eura mistakenly delivers to a livid Michelle. Later, Tea calls Tony to apologize for making him fall in love with her -- a pretty gracious move, considering he's the one who's been so pushy about their relationship.

But Tony is forced to spring into action -- and enlist the help of all the friends who have deserted him -- when he gets a text from an unknown sender that reads "took ur lil sista." He knows he can't turn to his short-fused father for help, so he shows up at Stanley's, and, after pleading his case, they round up their friends, who reluctantly agree to help find Eura.

Suddenly, everyone simultaneously gets a message bearing the photo of a strange symbol and instructions to meet the captors. (What is this, "Pretty Little Liars"?) Chris recognizes the symbol as the logo of a club he's been to. When they get there, it all looks like your average "Skins" night out: teenagers are dancing, a live band is playing. Then, a chilling image of Eura appears on a huge screen. Desperate and terrified, Tony gives in and calls his dad, who can't make out what his son is saying over the din of the party.

'Skins' recap: 'Teachers aren't grown-ups'

Student-teacher romance plots are hardly a new thing for TV. But this season, it seems as if every show that involves high-school or college kids has included some version of this story line, including serious dramas ("Big Love," "Friday Night Lights") and soapier teen fare ("Gossip Girl," which is already playing out its second variation on this theme, and "Pretty Little Liars"). Last month, PopWatch blogger Margaret Lyons got so sick of it, she fired off a quick polemic titled, "Enough with the hot-for-teacher stories, TV."

What's frustrating about these stories isn't just that they're sensational, or that they seem to happen so much more often on TV than in real life; it's that student-teacher love affair plots play out the same way almost every time. There's the initial, spontaneous embrace, followed by a brief honeymoon period, in which secrecy only heightens the intensity of the new relationship. Then the guilt sets in or the lies add up or the student's trusted friend says something she shouldn't and some parent or administrator begins to figure out what's going on. It all ends in some kind of disaster: a showdown between the teacher and an angry parent, an abrupt dismissal from the faculty, or even the teacher's arrest.

Chris and Tina's relationship on "Skins" follows basically the same pattern, but with one major difference. These stories are almost always told entirely through the eyes of the student, whose motives are never difficult to understand: a teenager finds an older authority figure attractive and then actually gets to sleep with her. What reckless 17-year-old would turn that down? But what about that teacher? How could a sane person decide to do something that is not only unethical and job-jeopardizing but also actually qualifies as statutory rape? It's those questions that rescue this week's episode, which centers on Tina.

'Skins' recap: 'No drama. No emotions.'

Eight episodes in, it's finally becoming clear what kind of show MTV's "Skins" is going to be. Its British predecessor strikes an odd, charming and delicate balance, juggling teenage life's ugly truth, the wide-eyed, almost fairy-tale romanticism of its young actors and writers, and the random cruelty of fate. But the American series' attempts to emulate the U.K. show's style have fallen flat, as in the context-free episode about Abbud, which had some fine moments but lacked a compelling core.

MTV's "Skins" is at its best when it sticks close to its characters, tells their stories in an honest way and manages to make us care about them. While British Michelle was fine as a one-dimensional pushover who existed solely to highlight Tony's moral bankruptcy, MTV's Michelle is the kind of smart, decent, yet troubled girl I actually want to root for.

This may mean that when it finally puts the U.K. series' influence behind it, the show will turn out to be a more conventional teen drama than British "Skins" fans have come to expect. It's easy to be disappointed by this, but stories about normal, mostly working-class high schoolers are rare enough on TV, in this era of rich kids and vampires, that the success of a more realistic, less fantastical "Skins" would still be welcome.

This week's episode was a confident step in that direction. Finally, we meet Daisy! Unlike the show's other neglected character, Abbud, her episode actually brings us deep into her life -- and away from the four characters (Michelle, Tony, Tea and Stanley) who have dominated much of this season. We even get to know Abbud better.

'Skins' recap: 'I'm like a joke to everybody'

For a character who's gotten so much screen time as a central knot in the "Skins" kids' messy web of romantic entanglements, Michelle has remained somewhat mysterious. She's beautiful, sure, and apparently easily manipulated; Tony dribbles her like a basketball, faking one way with rich, pretentious Tabitha, passing to Stanley when it suits him, going behind her back with Tea -- and throwing her through the hoop just often enough to keep her coming back for more. Is she stupid, or what?

As we find out in this week's episode, Michelle is no dummy. In fact, as we learn in a heavy-handed meeting with her attractive female principal, she used to be one of the school's best students. But, as the eagle-eyed administrator intuits, now that Michelle is gorgeous, has a hot boyfriend and spends her free time partying with her cool friends, she's become a disappointment in the classroom. "1992," the principal says. "That was the year I stopped pretending to be stupid because I was pretty."

Yes, Michelle is a bit of a cliche. Or, rather, she's a slightly more interesting combination of two cliches: the smart girl who downplays her intelligence because she wants boys to like her and the clueless girlfriend who's the last to know that her boyfriend is cheating on her.

'Skins' recap: A minor character in his own life

Finally, we meet Abbud. At least, that was the promise of this week's episode. For the first half of this season, he's been the show's most poorly defined character. We know that he comes from a Muslim family, that he's prone to spontaneous rapping and that he is desperate to finally get laid. But despite the promise of an entire hour devoted to Abbud, we learned precious little more about him on this episode.

Perhaps the odd setting, and its lack of context, is to blame. On this week's "Skins," the cast (unaccompanied, inexplicably, by any classmates outside their clique) takes a school-sponsored trip to High in the Wild, a camp in Canada where they believe they're in for a weekend-long nature adventure. What they get instead -- after Abbud endures some painful racial profiling at the border and the group loses their bus in a chuckle-worthy struggle with a wounded moose -- is a few days of torture.

The mastermind of the trip is David, the young, self-proclaimed "cool teacher" who had an apparently life-changing experience at High in the Wild when he was a teen. He considers the camp's stern leader, a scowling, masculine woman in fatigues named Brown Paw, his role model. Addressing the motley crew of high schoolers he's brought her, she proclaims, "I look around at all your faces. I see low self-esteem, promiscuity and a disturbing amount of drug abuse." Brown Paw tells the kids that they will be addressed by assigned numbers while they're at High in the Wild; they'll have to earn back their names over the weekend.

She sets out a multitude of tasks and challenges for them, but we don't see how many of them actually turn out. Instead, the "Skins" crew sneaks around, freely pursuing drugs and promiscuity (and, for that matter, wallowing in low self-esteem). Stanley, always willing to take one for the team, has smuggled weed into Canada by shoving it up his hindquarters. The only problem?  He tells his friends on his way to the camp, "It's like my butt swallowed it up further." Oops. He spends most of the episode constipated and terrified.

'Skins' recap: 'A glutton for punishment'

It's hard to believe that we're already halfway through the first season of MTV's "Skins." As the show has made news for enraging the Parents Television Council, losing advertisers and possibly attracting a child porn scandal, the media has understandably appeared more interested in the controversy around "Skins" than in its actual content.

That's a shame, because in the past few weeks, "Skins" has shaken off the awkwardness that annoyed so many early critics and dispensed with much of the semi-gratuitous sex and drugs that had the PTC so hysterical. (The sex and drugs are still there, mind you. They're just more integral to the plot.) By moving further away from its British predecessor's scripts, the MTV show is finding its own niche. The best episodes by far have been Cadie's and Tea's — the ones that take little to nothing from the U.K. version. And considering that creator Bryan Elsley's plan is to diverge more and more as time goes on, American "Skins" may just turn out to be as great a show as its across-the-pond counterpart.

There are some things that bug me, sure. Five episodes in, we should have a good sense of most of the characters' personalities. But Daisy and Abbud still feel like sketches. And the more I think about Tony and Tea, the less I understand her feelings for him. All sexual orientation-related concerns aside, it seems like she should be smart enough to see through his mystique to the knot of selfish insecurity that underlies his scheming.

This week's show didn't do anything to quell either of these concerns. But it's hard to be disappointed after our first full hour with Stanley, my favorite male character on "Skins." A shy, goofy slacker played with a nervous, baby-deer-in-the headlights quality by Daniel Flaherty, Stan is also the most innately sweet kid in the crew. While his friends have struggled with parental abandonment and mental health issues, his biggest quandary this season has been whether to hold out hope that Michelle will someday leave Tony for him or try to make a go of it with Cadie.

'Skins' recap: Happiness is a warm pill bottle

The "crazy" teenage girl generally takes two forms in pop culture: There's the depressive type, prone to moping around, writing sad journal entries, cutting herself, or maybe even attempting suicide. And then there's the girl with an eating disorder -- an anorexic or bulimic perfectionist, desperate to impose some control on a messy, adolescent life.

Cadie, this week's protagonist on "Skins," incorporates elements of both archetypes. (In fact, her predecessor on the British series, Cassie, was a poetic, ethereal variation on the standard bulimic.) She's been institutionalized, and her pill binges seem to fall somewhere between desperate means of escaping from difficult situations and suicidal cries for help. Throughout the episode, we hear that Cadie is supposed to have obsessive-compulsive disorder and any number of less-specific symptoms. But no one seems to be quite right about -- or even understand, on a rudimentary level -- what's wrong with Cadie.

We see her talk to three very different psychiatrists over the course of a few days. The first, a stiff, professional-looking, middle-aged woman calls her bluff when Cadie says she's happy. "My vagina has the look and feel of turkey jerky," Dr. Moore confides, by way of urging her patient to embrace her youth.

Cadie knows how to manipulate the next shrink -- a woman who looks like she listens to a lot of Enya in her spare time -- into prescribing her a pile of pills. She makes a big show of freaking out over birds, which she supposedly obsesses over and finds oppressively filthy. Out comes the prescription pad when Cadie confides that a close encounter with one such creature has left her feeling murderous.

Finally, a third psychiatrist, Dr. Rich, listens to a vivid fantasy Cadie has about shooting her father and makes an unexpected suggestion: "Have you tried not taking drugs?"

'Skins' recap: Home alone

It seems fitting that the hardest partying character on "Skins" should be at the center of the show's biggest controversy to date. Over a week ago, the New York Times cited an anonymous source who claimed MTV executives were panicking over scenes on the show that they feared violated child pornography laws. The particular moment that supposedly caused the most worry wasn't a steamy girl-on-girl sex scene -- it was a brief shot in this week's episode that showed Chris (played by 17-year-old Jesse Carere) running down the street, naked from the back, having been locked out of his house by a squatter.

Someone must have determined that showing Carere's backside does not, in fact, constitute child pornography, because it certainly wasn't edited out of the episode. As far as I'm concerned, this was the right decision. Amid all the hysteria over the way "Skins" sexualizes its teenage cast, the flap surrounding this "American Pie"-like moment seems particularly misguided. Although he also spends much of his screen time in this episode sporting an erection induced by too many Viagra-style prescription pills, this week's protagonist never comes across as objectified. These antics aren't supposed to be sexy; they're clearly some combination of funny and desperate, just like Chris, the designated sad clown of the "Skins" gang.

Chris wakes up to two surprises at the beginning of the episode: the aforementioned erection and an envelope full of cash from his single mother. She's left him the princely sum of $1,000, with a scrawled note saying she's gone out of town for a few days.

'Skins' creator Bryan Elsley: 'The show is the opposite of pornography'

“The show is the opposite of pornography,” “Skins” creator Bryan Elsley told The Times in an interview this week. “It isn’t us who are being provocative. I think that some of the people who object to the show are being provocative in the use of that word.”

The MTV drama is up to its kohl-caked eyelids in controversy. Even before its Jan. 17 premiere, the Parents Television Council had launched an all-out offensive against the series. Less than a week into its run, Taco Bell, GM, Wrigley, H&R Block, Schick and Subway had pulled ads from the show, and the parents group is urging the government to investigate “Skins” for child pornography. 

Elsley, creator of both the MTV series and the British version on which it’s based, says he doesn’t foresee altering “Skins” to quell protests about its gritty depictions of teenage sex and drug use. The show inspired some hysteria in the UK, too, where tabloids dubbed out-of-control teen parties with no parental supervision “Skins parties.” Elsley said the media circus never affected the content of the British series, noting that the show “did not invent the concept of waiting for your parents to go on holiday to throw a party.”

You can read more in our feature on the Skins controversy.

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-- Judy Berman

Photo: Danny Flaherty, James Newman and Jesse Carere of "Skins." Credit: MTV

'Skins' recap: 'Nobody matches up to me'

Since last week's premiere, MTV's "Skins" has faced attacks on two fronts. The biggest and scariest offensive is, of course, against the Parents Television Council, which has already persuaded six advertisers (Taco Bell, GM, Wrigley, H&R Block, Schick and Subway) to pull out of the show and is also urging the federal government to investigate "Skins" for child pornography.

Less threatening but equally vocal is the substantial contingent of critics who, having seen only the series' debut episode, have declared it an utter travesty. Their main complaints seem to be that MTV's "Skins" is an amateur-hour ripoff of the original and that, try as we may, Americans just will never be as cool as Brits, so we might as well give up now.

If there is any justice in the world (and I realize that's a big "if"), this week's episode will quiet both groups. It was thoughtful, character-driven, touching and miles from morally bankrupt, as well as totally different from any story line we saw on "Skins" U.K. Series creator Bryan Elsley has said he replaced the British character Maxxie, a gay boy, with Tea, a lesbian, because he needed to create a role that would allow him to cast actress Sofia Black-D'Elia. After watching an entire episode built around Tea, it's easy to see why. By far the most charismatic actor on the MTV series, Black-D'Elia is confident, subtle and emotionally honest.

In her hands, and those of the "Skins" writing staff, Tea is more than just The Gay Character -- the high schooler we all know from teen dramas and coming-of-age movies, who struggles to come out of the closet and teaches everyone a very important lesson about tolerance. While she may not be out at home, her friends already know she's interested in women and accept her sexual orientation without question. In fact, she's not even shy about popping a pill, donning a sequined tank top and walking into the coolest lesbian dance party in town like she owns the place.

Wrigley joins GM, Taco Bell in pulling ads from MTV's 'Skins'

Yet another advertiser has jumped ship from MTV's new series, "Skins." Wrigley, the parent company of chewing gum brands Orbit and Extra, joins Taco Bell and GM as the third company to pull ads from the show.

In an e-mail to Show Tracker on Friday evening, Jennifer Jackson-Luth, senior manager of marketing communications for Wrigley, wrote, "Wrigley has decided to suspend any advertising during MTV's 'Skins' as it is never our intent to endorse content that could offend our consumers. Any ads that previously aired during the show were part of a broader advertising plan with the network."

Earlier Friday, MTV responded to GM's and Taco Bell's retreat from the show in a statement: "We have an ongoing dialogue with our advertising partners about the best fit for them across our diverse lineup of shows. We know that not every show works for every advertiser. That said, we are confident that 'Skins' will continue to connect with the audience it was created for and that advertisers will take advantage of the opportunity to reach them."

In the days leading up to its premiere Monday, "Skins" earned the ire of the Parents Television Council, which has labeled the series "the most dangerous television show for children that we have ever seen." On Tuesday, the PTC issued a "take action alert" urging its members to contact Taco Bell and ask that it stop supporting "Skins." Now, the PTC has promised to go after all of the show's major sponsors, including H&R Block, L'Oreal, Schick Hydro, Foot Locker and Subway. The group is also campaigning for the federal government to investigate "Skins" for child pornography.

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— Judy Berman
twitter.com/judyberman

Photo: James Newman and Rachel Thevenard of "Skins." Credit: Jason Nocito