Skins

The original Skins, wearing more clothes

I love well-done teen shows. I think My So-Called Life is one of the best TV shows ever and I'm a huge Veronica Mars fan. The first season of Gossip Girl was brilliant. I'm merrily addicted to Pretty Little Liars. I haven't seen Freaks and Geeks but someday I will, and I know I'll love it. Hell, I even like Glee, (although my love has been waning as of late). So I'm relieved there are now places on cable for teen shows where they don't have the extreme ratings pressure that the major networks carry.

I haven't see the British Skins, so I had no expectations. I just wanted it to be good. Pilots are hard. I try to give new shows one additional episode even if I don't like the pilot because so much info is crammed into such a small amount of time and they often don't capture the true spirit of the show. And after the first episode of Skins that's how I felt. I didn't really have a feel for the show. I knew that the lead guy couldn't act his way out of paper bag, which was disheartening. And he looks like Penn Badgley from Gossip Girl, which can be good or bad depending on your taste.

Half the episode was ADR. Maybe they were trying to fix Poor Man's Penn Badgley's performance, or they scimped on their sound recordist. Either way, it was obvious ADR. Um, sound mixers, were you asleep during the mix? The show sounded like ass. I've been to a few mixes, and the mixers are the most anal people I've ever worked with. They hear mistakes I can't hear even when they're pointed out to me. The mixers are wonderful, perfectionist dogs howling at whistles I can't hear. It's beautiful. I don't know what happened with the Skins mix.

So I watched the second episode. Again, there were ADR issues, but not as bad as the pilot. Again, the show was meh. So I gave it one more episode. Same thing. The show isn't good enough to get excited about, but it has potential, and isn't bad enough to automatically cancel it out. There's some decent acting, Jesse Carere and Britne Oldford are standouts. The production seems to know Poor Man's Penn Badgley isn't very good because in a pivotal scene where he was pleading with his crush, they left her take running the whole conversation and never showed his face. Sort of hilarious, sort of sad. Anyway, I think I'm done with the show. Last week's episode has been sitting on the DVR for a week and I saw a little of this week's episode which involved putting a moose out of it's misery. Way too early in a show to be needing moose humor.

Goodbye, Skins. You were worth the try. Time to go rid my DVR of you.