Do you know what your teenagers are watching? If it’s 10 on a Monday night, you might want to check that it’s not what the Parents Television Council (PTC) has called “the most dangerous program that has ever been foisted on your children.” In response to PTC, Salon observed, with characteristic snark, that such warnings are the best PR a TV show can get. They may have a point: the pilot episode of Skins, airing this week on MTV, got the highest rating for a new scripted series ever, garnering 3.3 million viewers, which Entertainment Weekly calls a “strong start.” Most of those watching (2.7 million) were within the “coveted 12-34 demographic” group.
But I doubt the kids are paying much attention to the PTC. The show’s big splash was due to at least two other factors. First, Skins is based on a successful British version, which has even fewer moral boundaries than the American show. Second, it was greatly hyped through social media well before its debut, creating an online community of young fans before it even aired; within days of the premiere, it had nearly 10,000 Twitter followers.
Newsweek describes Skins as a “controversial new series” that “portrays teens as experimental and sex-obsessed, lying to their parents and sneaking out at night. In other words, it shows them as they really are.” Well, I was once a teen, so I find it hard to disagree with this characterization, but that doesn’t make the show okay.
Don’t get me wrong. My pop-culture sensibilities are far from sensitive. (I’m even a member of that secret cult of Christian women who surreptitiously watch Sex and The City – or at least the edited versions that have gone into syndication.) The problem with Skins isn’t just the elements that border on the pornographic or those that normalize rampant recreational drug use, same-sex relations, and various sexual experimentations. Nor is the problem solely that the show’s “depiction of such activities is on a scale never before seen on TV,” as the PTC puts it.
The problem is that, despite a rating of TV-MA, these activities are depicted as those of teenagers—aka minors, aka children.
Consider shows that might include all of these objectionable elements but in a world centered on and populated by adults—by which I don’t simply mean 18-and-over, but actual adults.
But now consider that Skins is a show about the sex lives of minors, and yet also conceived, produced, directed, financed, and marketed by adults. Isn’t it more than a little creepy to think about the kind of grown-ups who sit down and write scripts for and give stage directions to a bunch of actors pretending to be children having sex? (It’s important to note that some of the actors are, in fact, children.) If you’re having trouble imagining that, here’s an excerpt from one story on the show that depicts just such a scene:
In a downstairs recording studio in New York’s West Village, Bryan Elsley [age 49], a co-creator of the British teenage comedy-drama “Skins,” was guiding James Newman, a star of the MTV remake of the show, through a typical line of dialogue.
Conjuring up his confidence, Newman, a handsome, baby-faced 18-year-old who plays Tony, the cocky ringleader of a high school clique, said to an unseen co-star, “Normal girls like it.”
Elsley offered his thoughts on the line reading.
“If you could be slightly scandalized,” he said, “but also amused.
In an interview afterward, a more demure Newman declined to specify what indiscreet act he was trying to talk another (undoubtedly female) character into during that scene.
“You’ll see,” he said with a grin.
Now imagine having teens in your household and having the likes of Mr. Elsley as your next-door neighbor.
The usual Hollywood excuse—”It’s just acting”—falls short, because It fails to address what’s being acted out. That’s the excuse that a mother of one of the show’s cast members told herself as she read the script’s requirements that had her 17-year-old son naked in scene after scene, kissing person after person.
The truth of the matter is that, in the course of such “acting,” the actor really does get naked and really does kiss people, or whatever.
Yet it’s not only the actors who are implicated in the sexual behavior required to create the show. Skins‘ 10-minute promotional trailer introducing the cast of characters, through camera work that slowly scans the nubile bodies of the players, tranforms the camera lens—and the eyes of any adult watching—into the gaze of a pedophile.
Now that’s a problem.
Apparently MTV execs have come to recognize this as a problem, too. The New York Times reports that the channel is asking the show’s producers to take it down a few notches. And The Wall Street Journal says the show, in fact, “may be pushing the limits of child pornography laws.” As NYT reporter Brian Stelter points out:
Child pornography is defined by the United States as any visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. In some cases, “a picture of a naked child may constitute illegal child pornography if it is sufficiently sexually suggestive,” according to the Justice Department’s legal guidance.
In response, the PTC has asked the chairman of the U.S. Senate and House Judiciary Committees, and the Department of Justice, to investigate whether the show violates child pornography laws.
The heightened controversy might end up with the show’s producers laughing all the way to the bank. But they might just be better off having millstones hung around their necks.
