Daily Dose: MTV plays Let’s Make a Deal with SKINS


While a festival of deal-making is raging in Park City, MTV is playing let’s make a deal, any deal, with big sponsors on their ill-fated remake of the popular UK (Channel 4) television series “Skins.” And the sponsors are dropping the show like a bad habit.

Ironically, Morgan Spurlock’s latest documentary, “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” played to big crowds at Sundance and chronicles the business of product placement showing that being shamelessly commercial does pay off. And “Skins” seems to be the perfect showcase for marketing all things youthful to today’s oversexed and techno savvy kids, but nary a substantial sponsor seems poised to take the plunge and stick with it. Perhaps the only ads on the show will be aimed at the Howard Stern crowd, which given the subject of the series is a little bit creepy.

But what of the show itself that has been as demonized as the toxic “The Kennedy’s” mini-series? The source material for “Skins” was very explicit, but folks in the UK did not protest it from what I can remember. And if you actually watch enough of that show, you’ll see that it is littered with heart-felt cautionary tales of troubled kids left to raise themselves after a certain age. The reality of the story-lines were mainly off-putting because they were, after all, fairly true to life. In one episode that I can remember, a kid is left by his mother in a house that has become something of a drug and party den. He’s eventually kicked out of the house by a squatter and is forced to turn to a teacher for help. The kid is basically homeless and the gravity of his depressing situation hits you across the face harshly. Such a thing isn’t glamourous.

One thing to keep in mind is that in the UK kids do graduate high school earlier than our kids here. So the characters in the UK Skins were arguable a bit more mature than our sheltered teens. One wonders if this fact was lost on the show’s US producers. From watching the amped up trailer and other video segments available online for this US MTV version, much of the new show seems to be a shot-by-shot remake. What is troubling though is the tone struck in the trailer. To me, it looks as though this US version will be a little more sensational than its predecessor, hence one of the issues even fans of the original may very well have with the remake. The trailer makes it look fun to be bad. And generally that’s true, at least, in the short run. And we all know that youth is a fleeting thing.

Unfortunately, I missed the second episode on Monday night (my co-host Jeff and I took in “The Mechanic”). Luckily, MTV has set up a flashy website (http://www.skins.tv) that contains a fair amount of video. I’ve watched the webisodes and had to verify my age once. Of course, this was easily circumvented by a young person who would lie about their age. No young people ever lie do they?

The “Skins” website looks very much like it was sponsored by Microsoft’s now discontinued Kin cellphone. You know the one that wasn’t really a smartphone but, rather, a device aimed at the young crowd that wanted to text and update their Facebook page on the fly. That look was continued slightly with the new Windows 7 phone. Check out the site, it really looks like a Windows 7 phone advertisement. I doubt that Microsoft would care to jump on as a regular show sponsor even if it meant that their slowly selling smart mobile device would gain on Blackberry, Droid, and Apple.

One webisode on Skins.tv has a couple of young guys boxing and talking sex–there’s language and innuendo. And another is a racy sequence with a nubile boy and girl trying on lingerie and flirting playfully in the girl’s bedroom. It’s fairly innocent and probably a realistic depiction of high school life. But the full-length show that plays at 10pm probably goes a bit farther.

It would be easy to be cavalier about the MTV “Skins” and chalk this one up as a sign of the times. Sure kids today, like any kids, do risky and dangerous things. They have sex, drink, and do drugs. But that does not mean that these things should be celebrated or encouraged as a “rite of passage.” And regardless of the message or moral taught by each episode, the net effect may be the perception that when you’re young it’s part of the youthful experience to do these things. Young people today could point to our own President who admits doing cocaine and say, “look he’s the President, for Pete’s sake.” Of course, they’d never say “Pete’s sake” and probably not even know what that meant and ask sarcastically while texting on their Microsoft Kin: “Just who is this Pete guy anyway Dad?”

No, there is a place for telling the story the way it really is and doing so in a responsible way that is finely tuned enough to leave us all with the impression that being bad just isn’t any good. But if the story turns preachy, the key audience will not watch and the message won’t ever be delivered. So, I’ll watch next Monday night and see what message is being conveyed. And I’ll keep reminding my daughter and step-son, who thankfully are too young to see the show, that being good is, well, good.