Shedding Skins.

The new series of Skins starts tonight and I await in a state of what can only be described as: apathy. It's not that I dislike Skins- quite the reverse in fact; I thought the first series of Skins was a brilliantly subversive drama and the finest piece of television aimed at Teenagers this century. It's just the second series was, well, awful. It really, really was. Where the first series took every cliche of "yoof" T.V and turned them on their heads, the second series reinforced every doubt and fear you had of what an E4 teenage drama would be, it was like As If all over again. The second series of Skins was, simply, dreadful. Where the first series managed to skillfully craft rounded, three-dimensional characters that took teen stereotypes and turned them on their head (quite literally in Tony's case), the second series took those characters and stripped them down into vapid, boring assortments of quirks and one-liners. The Series started to believe it's own hype and concentrated more on appearing edgy and cool and creating 'water cooler moments' for the playground (I'm not sure what the playground equivalent of a water cooler is these days, but, using Skins as my example, I assume it's some effortlessly cool Serbian drug dealer, whom the kids all gather around at break time to buy their mid-day Heroin kicks that they can all inexplicably afford in between their twice weekly flights to New York, all done without their parents even noticing.) I know the first Series had this problem to, but even at its most ridiculous and far fetched (Russia anyone?) the series was wonderfully grounded by the believable and human characters that elicited emotion and humour from the stories. By the second series they were less believable than the plot-lines, and had all become so horrible that the only like-able character left was Chris, who achieved this simply through the virtue of being dead. The promos for the new series don't fill me with hope, with the pikey looking cast seemingly even younger than the first lot, and a truly terrible promo- where said pikeys blow up a pub, Suggesting that Skins 3.0 is going to be reaching for the ever more niche teen audience rather than allowing itself to be an enjoyably guilty pleasure for people over the age of 16 like it used to be. Still, I'll be watching, even if it's just to marvel peculiar fashion sense of trendy London types that permeate society, and wondering just how long I'd last in a school where everyone looks like Nick Grimshaw.