Tony, Effy, Cassie—Still

The best television series ever made is not American. It’s Skins, the E4 show about teenagers in Bristol that ran from 2007 across three distinct generations of characters, and it got everything right that American teen drama has historically gotten catastrophically wrong. No tidy lessons, no punished deviance, no sanitized version of what being young and confused actually feels like. Just the raw material: sex, drugs, grief, desire, and the specific way adolescence can feel like the most important thing in the world even as it’s grinding you down.

I was completely addicted for years. Tony and his self-destructive confidence. Cassie and her floating, fragile dreamworld. Sid fumbling every situation with the best possible intentions and the worst possible timing. Effy going to emotional places the show had no obligation to follow but did anyway. James Cook—barely contained rage. Mini, all surface, slowly cracking. Franky just trying to belong somewhere, anywhere. Every generation handed you new people to love and then put them through hell, and somehow it never felt exploitative. It felt like honesty.

The tenth anniversary in 2017 was a good reason to revisit it. One warning though: don’t watch it on any streaming platform that licensed it without the original soundtrack. The music in Skins is inseparable from the mood—specific songs at specific moments that couldn’t be replicated by the generic needle-drops that replaced them for rights reasons. Find the DVDs. It’s worth the effort to watch the version that actually exists as intended.