Here we go, the 5’th season of Skins is on air on channel E4, UK.

So far away, this teen drama from Bristol with love followed the adventures of a few sixteen and seventeen years old schoolmates: Tony, Sid, Michelle, Cassie, Chris, Jal, Maxxie, Anwar and Effy, strongly different one from another, easily framed into a system of clichés, subjects for a hurried and sometimes simplistic readymade. This is the new youth, a result of what last two or three generations have shared, built, passed on; these are the youngers sons and daughters our parents deserve to deal with, sociopaths or anorexics, doped, ninnies, sex addicted or super shy. Skins is a crew of “no more kids” acting like adults as often as not, facing oversized situations as they could do in a sport match, playing a role; through four different seasons, step by step, faces and postures have shift, keeping the subject index unchanged. But this is not the topic I am about to examine, today.

I am a twenty six years old girl who has grown up with Dawson’s Creek. I was about to fall in love with my first boyfriend when Joey Potter chose Pacey instead than Dawson, in spite of every expectation,  I was gloomy and mentally unbalanced when Abbey gave in to her blues, accidentally dying, I started to approach my first option about university when Jack and Jen decided to attend the Boston Bay College, cohousing. I felt very close to those characters, all anguished, turbulent, thoughtful and sensitive: whatever happened to them they pondered, rationalized and internalized every single impression, every step and upshot they came through while living together. No room for shallowness, no reason to be easy.

Twelve years have passed since I started to watch my first US serial, instead of cartoons or sit coms: how can a stretched generation have changed behaviors, models, icons, habits like this? What happened between Dawson’s Creek and Skins? They both are a resume of real life, postulating that a TV show always picks up its topic from the collectivity who creates and produces it; they also both are believable, well interweaved, never expected. But, even if age and patterns (unrequited loves, argues, civil disobedience, “first times”, family fights, no-showing, addictions… ) are still the same, something has twist my young pets from those to these. These: half-hearted, phlegmatic, reckless, messy, nonchalant, all doped, untimely uninhibited, soulfully anaesthetized. Kind of distant and clipped passersby. Not an unquiet crew of young adults, impatient to grow up and to learn how to face diseases, contrasts, fights: no more Jen who daily deals up with her disturbing, untimely loss of virginity, no more Jack up against an awkward homosexuality, but Michelle, proud to be a flighty party girl, or Maxxie, an untroubled tap dancer, gay clubs haunter. These, they’re not worried about whatever. To these, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. In these lives, there’s (often) no pretence of warning for no one, just a kind of fatalism.

These are our younger bros and sisters. But, I’m afraid, it is also possible that our sons will be like these, besides any good effort we will try or manage in raising them. Scary.

Whatever… every man for himself, hey!       

by Silvana Soffia

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