All the Parts MTV Removed
The gay character is now a girl. That’s the detail I keep returning to. Maxxie—the dancer, the one whose sexuality the British show handled with such matter-of-fact ease, as if it were just one more thing about a person rather than the thing about him—has been replaced by a female character in MTV’s American remake. No explanation offered. Apparently American television in 2011 could handle the concept of a gay character but couldn’t handle that gay character, that specific story, that configuration of desire within a group of friends. So they changed the gender and moved on.
Skins, the original E4 series, documented a group of Bristol teenagers with something close to anthropological honesty. It was crude and funny and occasionally devastating, and it treated being seventeen—the parties, the sex, the grief, the specific confusion that doesn’t yet have language for itself—as worthy of serious attention. It felt, when it aired, like something genuinely observed. The writing was good enough that the characters seemed to have lives between episodes.
The MTV version takes the first British series almost scene for scene. Same story, many of the same lines of dialogue, the same basic character shapes—transplanted to Baltimore, recast with American actors, and stripped of everything that gave the original its texture. The profanity is bleeped. There is no nudity. The emotional temperature has been carefully adjusted downward until nothing quite lands. Effy, the dark-haired and enigmatic one, is now blonde for reasons that escape me. Cassie has dark curly hair instead of the original’s pale severity. And Maxxie, as noted, is simply gone.
I watched an hour of it and felt the particular frustration of watching a good skeleton with no flesh on it. The structure of a compelling show is still there—the episode format, the character dynamics, specific pieces of dialogue lifted almost verbatim—but everything that made those elements work has been traded away. The willingness to be uncomfortable, to let characters be genuinely lost, to show bodies and desire without managing the viewer’s reaction: all of it swapped for something that could air without complaint. What’s left is the shape of Skins without its substance. Which is a polite way of saying it’s nothing.
The British original’s fifth series arrived at the end of January, with an entirely new cast—the show refreshed itself every two seasons, which was part of its particular discipline, and part of why it stayed interesting. That’s the version worth caring about. The MTV remake is for people who wanted the idea of Skins without having to sit with any of the parts that make it uncomfortable. Which is, of course, all of the good parts.