Blog 1 — What’s so funny?

▶ BCM288 TRANSNATIONAL MEDIA AND CULTURE INDUSTRIES

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Ever wondered what it would be like to live out your life as a different person everyday? Skins is the show that can do that for you! I’ve watched the entire Skins series (more than once) and I’ve never gotten tired of it. It can come off a little strong to others if you have certain opinions on sensitive topics because Skins is all about sensitive, dark topics.

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The whole show has 7 seasons in total with a different set of characters every 2-3 seasons, but the main plot for each season is roughly the same; a group of chaotic British teens living their life before the Instagram-Twitter-Facebook day in age (Travis 2017). Apart from love, sex and drugs being the three main contestants of the series, there were hints of topics-that-shall-not-be-named (but I’m naming them anyways) and they were about abortion, mental health/illness, abuse and much more. One of the best reasons why this show was successful was because of the way each character was put into spotlight, for each episode we look more into the eyes of an individual character but it doesn’t just goes down simply — the show does it in a way that we have to anticipate the next episode or even just the next few seconds later. Think of it as an onion, there’s many layers but you have to peel through each one before you get to the core (Estes 2011).

The original Skins is based off in the UK, the US decided it would be a good idea to remake their own version of the show considering the big fan base over on the other side of the world, not to mention the overwhelming amount of high ratings and reviews— little do they know that it wouldn’t even be good enough to have a second season. Skins US only ended up releasing 1 season after cancelling production of the next one, it didn’t take long for the show to be disliked because the ratings already plummeted after the first episode was aired (Grant 2011).

So what happened? Why didn’t it work out for the Americans? Well for starters, if you put the first episodes of Skins US and Skins UK next to each other you can see that they just copied it entirely scene-for-scene (Davies 2019). Skins was meant to show teenagers raw and unfiltered, the show is made to show teenagers just being teenagers without any parents or parental figures around but the US version just didn’t seem to understand that. Instead the US version of the show seems more scripted as compared with the UK version, therefore losing it’s purpose of “seeing life in the eyes of a teenager”.

References:

1. Davies, Bree. “American Skins Versus U.K. Skins: Looks like MTV Forgot That the Boobs Were the Best Part.” Westword, 4, 23 Jan. 2019, https://www.westword.com/arts/american-skins-versus-uk-skins-looks-like-mtv-forgot-that-the-boobs-were-the-best-part-5795194.
2. Estes, Mark O. “Skins UK vs. Skins US: An Analysis.” TVOvermind, 4 Mar. 2011, https://www.tvovermind.com/skins-uk-skins-analysis/.
3. Grant, Drew. “Why MTV Canceled ‘Skins.’” Salon, Salon.com, 25 Sept. 2011, https://www.salon.com/2011/06/10/american_skins_canceled/.
4. Travis, Ben. “Why Skins Was the Perfect Teen Show.” Evening Standard, 25 Jan. 2017, https://www.standard.co.uk/stayingin/tvfilm/skins-was-ambitious-messy-erratic-and-inventive-and-that-s-why-it-was-the-perfect-teen-show-a3449721.html.