Can MTV Translate ‘Skins’?

Questions remain. Will bi-curious alpha-male Tony remain bi-curious? Will Teo get to have more fun than mostly celibate Maxxie? Will it kill off Chris? Will Cassie still AWOL it to New York? With Jal and Maxxie’s shifts in ethnicity, will the series deal with race? Will it deal with religious identity and abortion, as the original does?  Will this be Obama-era MTV? What does that even mean?

MTV’s move to scripted programming mirrors what other cable networks are doing — AMC, FX, TNT, and all the rest. Given its long-held dominance in reality programming, however, I wonder how it’s justifying its move to more expensive shows. A series like Skins with its focus on social problems — the UK appears to be enmeshed over a moral panic over the state of its youth — certainly fits within an MTV aesthetic, the MTV of Pedro Zemora and True Life. That history bodes well for a US Skins, but fears will not be allayed until after the series premiere.

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