The U.K. television series “Skins” was wildly successful both in its home country and abroad, so in 2011, MTV attempted to bring that success to the U.S. with their own adaptation. Almost directly copying the first season of the U.K. version character-for-character and beat-for-beat, just with a new location, the new “Skins” had the potential to be a stateside sensation. The show even had original series creator Bryan Elsley helping to adapt it, and they cast an entirely new group of amateur relative-unknowns, hoping to maybe launch a few careers in the spirit of its predecessor. (Seriously, the first season of “Skins” boasts Daniel Kaluuya, Kaya Scodelario, Hannah Murray, and Dev Patel.) Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and the show was cancelled after just one season — so what happened?
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It seems like the U.S. just wasn’t ready for something like “Skins,” which is pretty funny considering the success of the U.S. adaptation of the equally-racy “Shameless,” but ratings were low and the show proved too costly for MTV when parent watchdog groups started protesting and getting advertising pulled. In a dream world, MTV would have been able to really go wild with their version of the soapy drama for teens, but American pearl-clutching and trying to recreate the original almost exactly spelled its early end.
Skins U.S. was doomed almost from the start
Both versions of “Skins” follow a group of somewhat troubled teenagers in their last two years of high school, exploring tough topics like sexuality, pregnancy, drug use, and abuse. The show can be tough to watch, with its young characters experiencing all kinds of trauma, but it does feel authentic in some ways to the teen experience because teenagers in real life often do use drugs, have sex, and party too hard. Part of what made the original show feel so brilliant was the young cast of mostly unknowns (including a baby Dev Patel), because unsurprisingly it feels more real when teens play teens, but that upset the Parents Television Council, who wanted a federal inquiry into the series because they felt it was “child pornography.” While the characters do engage in mature activities and some of the actors were under the age of 18, it’s never presented for titillation, just to show how teens actually live.
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Advertisers pulled their commercials from airing on MTV during the show’s airtime, including Taco Bell and General Motors, and after only one season with very modest viewership, they decided to pull the plug. Reviews from the time point out the show trying to clean itself up for the U.S. version while also copying everything else shot-for-shot in certain episodes felt like a watered-down adaptation at best, so maybe it’s for the best that the MTV “Skins” crashed and burned. Oh well, we’ll always have the U.K. version, which ran for seven seasons and is like “Euphoria” but better.
