Weekly Written Analysis 3

        Usually, stories which revolve around the lives of children and adolescents often share a common theme. The theme usually consists of children and/or adolescents who face some sort of adversity. Most often the adversity consists of some form of poverty and/or dead parents, which causes the children and/or adolescents to band together to create some sort of family. Nonetheless, this type of  situation was usually temporary, as an adult usually came into the adolescents life at some point in time. However, as time has progressed, these types of stories have changed. Nowadays,  parents no longer have to be dead to be absent and even when present, they are not portrayed as helpful. For this week's analysis I chose to review the new series aired by MTV (Music Television) which is called Skins (McNamara, 2011).

         Skins, the British original and now a MTV remake, portrays realistic sex, drug use, and self-destructive behavior performed by adolescents. The show introduces a group of alienated teens as they plot to aid a geeky member of the group in losing his virginity. The architect of this idea is Tony who resembles a modern day Eddie Haskell. Tony enlists in his girlfriend Michelle, who is hesitant to do have sex herself. Therefore, Michelle acquires the aid of Cadie, a girl recently sprung from rehab, who will sleep with anyone who provides her with drugs. Other members of the group consists of Abbud- the wise-cracking Muslim; Tea- the lesbian cheerleader; Chris-the baby-faced party boy; and Daisy-the hazily annoyed go-getter (McNamara, 2011).

         The new show is considered to be the anti Gossip Girl. The series also consists of events like crashing the party of an all-girls school, and a scared-straight assembly. The show is kind of ludicrous in that not only do the kids have no homework or extracurricular activities, but school is depicted as just a place to smoke, gossip, and have occasional altercations with teachers who are dumb or psychologically unstable. Skins seems to be nothing more than an R-rated teen soap opera which lacks any truly meaningful characters (McNamara, 2011).

References

McNamara, M. (2011). Los Angeles Times. Television review: 'Skins' on MTV features lots of teen sex and drug use. Retrieved January 17, 2011, from http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/17/entertainment/la-et-skins-20110117