SKINS (MTV) “Tea” Review

SKINS (MTV) “Tea” Episode 2 – “Tea,” the second episode of MTV’s controversial new drama SKINS aired tonight and I’m happy to report that some of my biggest peeves from the pilot episode seem to have been improved upon here. The writing was noticeably Americanized and as a result the dialogue seemed a thousand times more natural. The downside of this much needed improvement however, is that it has become jarringly clear that many of these teenaged actors are in desperate need of some serious acting coaching if they want to keep up with the tone Skins is trying to pull off.

As far as I can tell, there’s supposed to be humor sprinkled in there – playfulness in the dialogue to remind us that these are youthful high school students who maintain a fun façade despite their private struggles. Now that these kids are speaking American, it’s painfully obvious when something was written to be humorous but misses the punch. With a few exceptions, most of the main cast just can’t get the comedic timing yet. Jesse Carere, who plays Chris, seems to be having the most fun and even though he was barely featured in this episode it seems he might have the most natural knack for that timing. Unless Skins decides to write out the little funny bits of dialogue, they’re going to have to really push these actors to get the humor right otherwise the poorly delivered wit turns into eye-rolling, awkward dialogue.

Thankfully the cast doesn’t seem to have the same problem when they’re dealing in drama. This second episode provided an opportunity for more serious emotional situations than the frivolous pilot. We meet Tea’s loud loving family to whom Tea feels disconnected. At first when Tea is complaining to her snoring grandmother about her previous unsatisfactory, shallow relationships with women, I wanted to stop her and remind her that she’s just as uninteresting as all the other girls her age and that maybe if she got to know people before jumping into bed with them she might find a more emotionally fulfilling relationship. But then as I watched her interact with Tony on their date it made more sense. I’m an adult; she’s a teenager that believes she is cuter, wittier, and wilder than everyone else her age – a regular, vulnerable kid making more terrible life decisions than your average high school student. Even if I could yell at her, it wouldn’t matter.

She complicates things because she’s the type of person that constantly convinces herself that her burden is a solitary struggle. She knows her family loves her and that her friends adore her, so she hides her insecurities and feelings of alienation rather than risk losing it all. This is why the later scene with Tea crawling into bed with her grandmother was so brilliant. Tea turns to her grandmother because she knows Nana won’t have anything to say – she can be comforted by a person she trusts without having to put anything on the line. Thankfully, in a moment of rare clarity Nana shares a painful and heartfelt memory, connecting with Tea in a way that Tea probably would never have expected. The world her grandmother grew up in is significantly different than the one Tea is living in and her grandmother’s pain, loneliness and heartbreak may not be identical to Tea’s but it was enough for her to see she was not alone. I hope Tea gradually finds the strength to share her struggles with others despite the risk. It’s too much of a burden for one kid to carry alone and obviously she’s not doing a very good job of it so far.

While I like the way Skins has shared Tea’s inner struggle with us, I’m not sure I feel the same way about the way they’re dealing with her external drama. For one thing, I’m not a fan of Betty; she kind of gives me the creeps in a weird stalkerish way. I’m also on the fence about Tea and Tony’s quick hook up. I haven’t seen the U.K. version of Skins, but it’s been practically impossible to avoid reading any news surrounding the Skins controversy, so I stumbled upon a spoiler (Stop here if you haven’t watched the U.K. series) which mentioned that Tony hooks up with Maxxie, the male gay character that is supposedly Tea’s alternate. It struck me how completely conventional it was for MTV’s series to have Tea – the hot lesbian girl – hook up with the good looking guy. It’s the pubescent boy’s cliché fantasy come to life. It appears to unintentionally suggest that given the right “match” – as Tony puts it – even a gay person would go straight. To a comfortable heterosexual audience, it’s much less threatening for the queer character to question her sexual identity than it would be to have the heterosexual, hypersexual Tony toe the line of his. We’ll see where they go with this though since I could see it moving in any direction from this point and I hope they choose to challenge the norms with more than implied teen sex.