What Skins Did to Me on the Night Train

When The O.C. was cancelled, something quietly collapsed in me. I’d built a lot of mental furniture around that show, and without it I drifted through television in a grey fog until someone pointed me at Skins.

The British series has technically the same premise as every teen drama ever made: a group of teenagers, their relationships, the mess they make of everything. Drugs, sex, love, the specific ways things go wrong at that age and stay wrong. On paper it sounds like a formula. What it actually is, though, is something rawer and stranger and more honest than anything I’d seen in that genre. It doesn’t aestheticize adolescence into something golden. It shows you the actual texture of it.

I watched most of it on long overnight trains with headphones on, unable to stop. There were stretches where Cassie—beautiful, perpetually stoned, completely unmoored from consensus reality—kept me sane in a way I still find hard to explain. Tony with his particular brand of charismatic cruelty. Sid, loyal and fumbling and impossible not to root for. I loved these characters in a way that felt embarrassingly real.

Watch it in the original English. The accents matter, the language matters, the way these kids talk to each other is half the show. The dubbed version is something different and worse.