Quality Teen Drama?: Skins Season 4

             American television has reached new heights with high-quality shows such as Mad Men, Dexter, and Damages. But a genre which seems to delve no deeper than puddles is the teen drama. This genre epitomizes campy performances and perfects cringe-worthy scenes. Shows like Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries have garnered high ratings but are merely guilty pleasures we’re too ashamed to watch with anyone else in the room. These shows depict adolescents as depraved deviants with flexible morals, consumed with sex, drugs, and partying. These shows reaffirm the paranoid fears of parents who have no clue where their children are at 10 pm.

Skins, a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award winning show which airs on BBC, is a show which does justice to the teen-drama genre. Yes, there is a vast amount of sex, drugs, and partying, but with substance and sophistication. Skins depicts the teenage years in all its complexity, embitterment, and melancholia. The show presents high school stereotypes as a mere façade, but a much needed mask to reveal the irony in each character’s lives. Skins continues its character-driven storytelling technique, in which each episode is devoted to one character’s story line. There is a total of 10 episodes a season, with the finale merging the individual subplots. Unlike American television, British shows normally do not drag seasons for no more than 12 episodes, compromising lucrative commercial airtime for logical, cohesive plot lines, less prone to losing the interest of fickle audiences.

Season 4 premiered on January 28, 2010. The first episode begins with a girl’s death due to a supposed MDMA overdose at a rave. The episode focuses on Thomas Tomone, a foreign exchange student from the Congo still in the progress of assimilating to a culture he considers too loose. He functions as a foil to the amoral behavior of the rest of the cast with his always earnest, always honest intentions.

The second episode focuses on Emily Fitch, the lesbian twin whose family utterly opposes her relationship with Naomi, another main character on the show, who came out of the closet at the end of last season. Emily fed up with her mother’s relentless jibes at her girlfriend and complete denial of her homosexuality, impulsively decides to move in with Naomi. The episode further builds on their fragile relationship.

Skins tries to outdo itself each season with more taboo behavior, where the audience is impelled to question whether or not it has reached a  point of saturation, in which the deviance is merely for shock-value and not necessarily plot or character driven. The excessive hedonism cannot be denied, but seems to act as a vehicle to reveal and emphasize the tragic flaws of each character. The well-crafted character development keeps Skins from crossing into vacuous teen soap opera territory.