New Blood
The morning they announced the new Skins generation, I felt like someone had kicked over a shelf. Four seasons of building characters, watching them break and rebuild, and now E4 had eight new faces ready to pretend none of it mattered. That’s the format—two generations per cast, then hand it over and start again. I knew it was coming. That didn’t make it suck less.
Frankie’s introduction did the work though. She set fire to the headmaster. Not deliberately—she had a lighter in her pocket and flicked it when she got nervous, and he reached for her hand just as a spark caught the straw poking out from under his Scarecrow costume during a school assembly. He ran through the hall screaming terrorist
at her while three hundred kids threw Coke bottles at him. Sugar makes fire worse. That was the statement: we don’t do order anymore.
Alo seemed to exist in a completely different register. He could identify the nationality of any pornographic film without sound—a skill that was somehow both stupid and revealing of something true. English girls have bad teeth. Americans follow instructions. Germans like anal. But then he’d talk about Victorian photographs and his voice would change entirely: people so sexually repressed they’d sneak through Jack the Ripper-era London just to get photographed naked by someone brave enough to do it. That’s desire, he was saying. That matters.
Rich hated Linkin Park and MCR with what felt like real conviction rather than affectation. He lived by a quote from some comedian—”life is like a porn film, it’s not made for everyone”—which meant he had permission to just dislike things without explaining. Metal. Ugly, angry music. Always right even when he was wrong. Nick was his opposite: no complexity, just momentum. Captain of the rugby team, drinking every day, treating his girlfriend right, getting along with anyone. Balls deep in life, that was the whole thing.
Mini had engineered herself into perfection. M&M because she was the super sweetest girlie you’ll ever meet—designer shoes, careful weight, shopping before sex, never leaving the house without armor. She knew exactly what she was doing. It was armor and it was working.
Liv didn’t want to talk about herself. She’d just give you a guide to dancing: find your people, find a place with loud music, feel it in your kidneys not your ears, do your duty to your booty. Grace kept saying okay-dokie
and seemed either brilliant or completely constructed. Jane Austen, theater, lucid dreams. Matty showed up in someone else’s socks quoting Nietzsche and Josef Fritzl in the same breath, talking about how reading his words right now was creating a moment that started when he clicked save.
Could they touch what the first two generations had built? That was the question everyone wanted answered, and it felt like the wrong question to ask. The show was good enough that it probably didn’t matter. You’d either connect with these eight people or you wouldn’t. The shelf that got kicked over would settle into place or it wouldn’t.