Skins: Season One, "Jal" and Chris"

“Fuck it, I don’t care”

-Jal

Series One, Episode Three, “Jal”

Skins’s handling of race has always been one of its less well-conceived elements. This is troubling because the series is so consistently nuanced and provocative on a wide range of issues. Not that the series needed to necessarily make Jal’s (Larissa Wilson) episode center on the fact that she’s African American. And to the episode’s credit, the story isn’t entirely concerned with Jal’s identity as it relates to race. 

The episode is primarily about Jal as an individual who feels overlooked. She feels like she’s second best in everything she does. She’s ignored by her best friend Michelle in favor of her boyfriend Tony. Her father can only think of her as the embodiment of her absent mother. The school administrators can only imagine her as a PR success. All she has to really be proud of is her talent as a musician, and even that gets overshadowed.  

And this general story works. What doesn’t is the home life Skins has built for Jal. Her father is a hip hop mogul and her bothers are wannabe rap artists. It all smacks of carelessness and stereotype.

There is a flippant quality to Skins. This can make it an invigorating viewing experience (as in the next episode). But there’s another side to Skins’s desire to slaughter any sacred cow it can get its fumbling hands on. Sometimes it botches the whole execution and it just comes across as sensationalism for its own sake. 

That’s a shame because it’s not all poorly thought out here. Take the scene where the college director insists that Jal tell the newscaster that her musical success is due to her school helping her rise above a disadvantaged background. This, despite the fact that none of it is true. It’s super racist, and it’s also played as a frustratingly commonplace moment for Jal. Then there’s the awkward breakfast spent with Jal’s dad’s latest girlfriend, a white woman. It’s another smart look at racial politics that doesn't lose focus of the character. 

But if there’s something that really works against the episode it’s the character of Jal herself. Jal is the “normal” character of the group. She’s not facing any major psychological problems, and she’s not caught up in any major drama. She’s the rock of the group, a reliable foundation that they often take for granted. Being normal, in of itself, isn’t a problem for making a story interesting, but some of the broader elements here distract from the chance to capture those smaller moments that allow us to really understand who the character is. 

Grade: B

Series One, Episode Four, “Chris”

When I think about Skins, I often return to this episode. It’s not a perfect episode of television, and the show would go on to pull off better episodes, but it’s the first episode that makes the series’ tonal gumbo work. 

Skins has always been a tonal jumble. Bits of silly comedic business sit side-by-side with bits of heart wrenching drama. This should lead to tonal whiplash, but often doesn’t. This is usually because the show uses the comedy in order to easy into more serious material. 

“Chris” is one of the more effective deployments of this. For about two-thirds of its run, the episode is busy burying some truly dark subject matter. Chris (Joe Dempsie) has been abandoned by his mother. He ignores this by choosing to party with reckless abandon. But when his funds run out, he’s forced to finally confront his precarious situation. 

Skins’s best episodes tend to be rambling, crisscrossing journeys. They burn through plot and dash from plot point to plot point. This should be ill advised storytelling, but it works because of the ultimate end places these episodes arrive at. Are there things that don’t work in this episode? Yes, but that really doesn’t matter. The cumulative effect is more important. Skins is a show as much about a particular mood as any story. It’s the scattered memories of adolescent. 

It helps that this end place is a total gut punch and a necessary character shading. Chris, like a lot of the characters, has read more like a cartoon than a real person. Like Cassie’s episode, the episode provides an aching sadness and vulnerability to the character. He does drugs to avoid dealing with his overwhelming grief and anger, over his brother’s death, over his abandonment by both parents. He acts all chipper and happy-go-lucky because he might implode otherwise. 

Much of this works because of Dempsie’s performance. Dempsie commits whole hog to everything he does here. He could have chosen not to do the scenes where Chris is full-on nude, but, instead, he utilizes it for slapstick comedy as well as character development. This is important because Chris more than just about every other character is a bit of a cipher on paper. It’s fairly self-apparent what we’re supposed to get out of characters like Sid or Tony or Cassie (even if performances are crucial to why those characters work). But, on the face of it, Chris often seems to exist entirely for goofy comic relief (Anwar faces a similar problem that will become much more problematic in the second season). That makes the dramatic business here even more compelling, but it’s also helped by Dempsie’s presence anchoring the more comical moments to an emotional reality. 

Grade: A- 

Stray Observations:

-Michelle: “You play the clarinet, and I look shaggable” 

-The other story playing out along the margins is the weird relationship between Tony, Michelle and Sid. Tony’s dickeshness becomes increasingly more apparent, while the show pushes our sympathies towards Sid and Michelle (having Michelle not be entirely oblivious is incredibly important for making us care about her). The Skins writers are a little obsessed with this story and think it's a little more interesting than it actually is. They'll eventually exhaust its potential, but, for now, it remains mostly strong and isn't super distracting from the main plot-lines.

-Also, Cassie is being casually ignored by Sid, which is so heartbreaking.  

-The running joke about how everyone knows about Sid’s crush on Michelle is just so funny.  Everyone has had that friend who had that blatant unobtainable crush and were too stupid to just move on. 

-“Ethnic Clarinetist” – Such a nice, hilarious little touch.

-Effy barely counts as a character at this point, but her scenes do hint at who she would become. The answer: a kind of cynical, kind of awful, loner.  

-In case the meaning of the show’s title were not already apparent, Jal’s dad briefly explains it. Not only that but he does it while rapping!

-Chris dropped a baby! 

-Chris’s monologue at the cemetery is a really good showcase for Dempsie. 

-The pairing of Chris and Jal brings out such interesting qualities in both of them (Jal is perhaps never more interesting than when paired with Chris). 

-Everything related to the Chris-Angie interactions continues to be so, so wrong. 

-There were a lot of very old people attending Chris’s parties, which is just a little disconcerting and beggars belief. 

- Chris, to my mind, is the first generation’s unofficial heart. This will have important implications for later episodes. 

-“Really, Skins?” (Stupid Things Skins Did): The drug dealer subplot continues to be suspect. But is it more or less dubious than Jal’s brothers?