Eight Strangers at the Gates of Roundview
Four seasons and two generations in, Skins has earned the kind of loyalty that makes otherwise reasonable people defend it to people who’ve never watched a single episode and probably never will. The crooked stories about British teenagers methodically wrecking their futures with alcohol, drugs, and spectacularly unwise sex left a deeper mark on me than most things that are supposed to be educational. Sid and Tony, then Effy’s crew—gone. E4 has now revealed the eight faces expected to carry the whole beautiful disaster forward.
First impression: they’re a lot.
Frankie is the one I’m most curious about. She accidentally set fire to her headmaster at a harvest festival—he was dressed as a scarecrow, she had a lighter, anxiety did the rest—and then he ran naked through the hall screaming "terrorist" at her while children threw Coke cans and the sugar made the flames worse. That is a person with a specific energy. She has Joan of Arc convictions and the quiet fuse of someone who will eventually do something genuinely alarming. She could be the psychopath we’ve been missing since Cassie wandered off.
Alo is a redhead who claims he can identify the nationality of any amateur pornography without audio. He makes a convincing case: English—bad teeth, generally grim; American—aggressive, follows the checklist; German—notable emphasis on certain anatomical priorities. He likes weed, his van, his dog, and will apparently sleep with anything that sits still long enough. His finest erotic discovery, by his own account, was a set of Victorian photographs of high-society ladies, obtained by trading away an entire back catalogue of softcore. He respects the hustle, honestly.
Rich is sixteen and already exhausted by other people’s taste. He likes metal—not Linkin Park, not My Chemical Romance, not whatever vaguely alternative thing you’ve decided makes you interesting. Ugly, angry music. His operating philosophy comes from Doug Stanhope: life is an animal porno, not made for everyone. He’s always right, even when he’s wrong—he’ll tell you that himself. I already like him more than I should.
Mini McGuinness has the initials M&M and a clear theory of herself: she’s the sweetest girl you’ll ever meet and she knows it. Apple martinis, immaculate hair, a BMI she monitors like a vital sign. The kind of beautiful that has become its own full-time project. I hope the show cracks her open and finds whatever’s underneath all that maintenance, because right now she’s either the most or least interesting person in the cast and I genuinely can’t tell which. For the record: she’s the sharpest-looking one in the promo photos, so she’d better earn it.
Liv feels like the member of the cast who’s actually fun to be around. She likes Die Antwoord, the film Kids, and Gilmore Girls—a specific combination that belongs to a person constitutionally immune to boredom. Her philosophy on dancing: find your people, find a floor, turn it up until you feel it in your kidneys and not your ears, and do your duty to your booty. That’s not nothing.
Grace starts sentences with "okay-dokie" and can lucid dream about whoever she wants and collects coins. She was at a girls’ school before Roundview, which should be interesting once the walls come down. If she were an ice cream flavor she’d be vanilla. I have a bad feeling about her—not because she seems dangerous, but because she seems like the one who gets hurt.
Nick is the rugby captain, balls deep in everything by his own account. He’s sleeping with Mini—or we’re meant to assume so—and considers himself three-dimensional because he doesn’t actively despise weird people. "I get them," he says. That’s a low bar, Nick. Still, he’s the kind of inevitable character Skins does well: the alpha who slowly discovers the script he’s been handed wasn’t written for him.
And then there’s Matty. He walked in quoting Nietzsche and Burroughs and then spent three minutes explaining why he wears other people’s socks. David Lynch inspires him. He talks about the collapse of time between the moment of writing and the moment of reading, how you’re inside the same present tense with him whether you like it or not. It’s either profoundly pretentious or genuinely unhinged, and in this show that’s the most interesting position to occupy. He has the specific energy of someone who will either write something extraordinary or do something unforgivable.
Two generations of Skins have already made me feel things I wasn’t expecting. I’m not ready to fall for a third one yet, but I’ll be watching.