Bollocks

I recently discovered this amazing new British TV show that I just have to write about.  It was my suggestion on the last post.  It's called Skins and its about this group of teenagers that live in Bristol England.  Its a comedy but it also has alot of serious aspects too.  And the way the show is set up is different than any other show I've seen.  Each episode focuses on a single character, and in each character's episode you get to go deeper into their lives than you would if the episodes just focused on everyone all the time.  It's really kind of a revolutionary idea and its great.  Another thing the show does is that every 2 seasons it completely changes the entire cast.  Similar US shows like the O.C. and Dawsons Creek (both of which are mentioned jokingly in the show) followed their characters off to college and the shows took a turn for the worse.  Skins avoids this and just flat out gets new characters when the current ones are finished with high school.  Its keeps the show fresh and free from boring predictable story lines. 

    
In each group of friends there is a character you can relate to, whether it is Sid from seasons 1 and 2 who is in love with his best friend's girlfriend, or Emily from seasons 3 and 4 who is constantly in the shadow of her prettier, more popular sister.  There is definitely a lot of over the top and gratuitous sex and drug use but the actual stories behind the insane parties used as plot devices somehow make even the most surreal moments seem utterly and totally believable.  I'm not sure if its because everyone speaks with an accent and uses vocabulary that I'm not quite familiar with, but the show is also hilariously witty.  Terms such as spliff, and tosser are used constantly, both of which it took an episode or two for me to figure out what they meant.  The word skins actually refers to rolling paper used for joints or "spliff" as they call it.  Seasons 3 and 4 are by far the most emotional I've seen.  When I'm watching, I kind of forget about everything else around me and just let Skins take me.  For a television show it just has amazing connective powers.  Sure I've felt like that about movies but never about a 45 minute episode of a TV series.  Again, I think it's the set up of the show that each episode essentially is a short movie about a single character, complete with the ups and downs of human emotion.

    
     MTV is unveiling a US version of skins in January.  I'll definitely be watching it but I just can't see how it can be the same.  The kids in the British version are all of legal drinking age which makes the party scenes and lack of parental control somewhat believable but I'm not quite sure how the US version will manage to pull this off.  Sure there's fake ID's but it just wont have that aspect of realism that the British version has.  So if you have netflix the go watch Skins and I promise you won't regret it.