chocolatepopcorn

I've watched this whole series twice. There's a lot more I noticed when I watched it a second time around. Without getting too much into detail, the UK characters portrayed here in the US were expanded upon & finetuned, in very suddle and not so suddle ways. A few big examples here are Michelle character, Cadie (Cassie UK), and Tea's (Maxxie UK) characters respectively. Most of the characters changes from UK to this version were more relative to the US lifestyle as opposed to UK, and that is something I don't think the UK will ever understand, even with their criticism aside before the show came out. What's special about Skins US, too, is that it represents a place and time in America, where we were as a culture, in style, and even on a deeper level, in music (which in my opinion, the music in the US version is much better than the UK). The changes made were necessary to make this show feel as real as it did, and as a not so proud American, I felt the connection to this show deeply as I was the same ages and grade(s) as most of the characters in the show and irl when this came out... Which brings me to why I personally appreciate Stanley's character so much, it reminds me heavily of who I was in High School & I personally feel that his character has more depth than Sid's did (if you look close enough). But even my enjoyment couldn't seperate the looming hate of the show across the pond as well as this show was just too far ahead of its time, many argue that MTV was to blame but most still had cable around this time... Big streamers like Netflix hadn't become relevant yet and putting this show on HBO would have caused less kids to see it... And that's always been the goal behind Skins, to get it to the youth and beyond so they have something to relate to and feel a connection with, but the parent teacher television did not care, so this show would have suffered the same fate anyway. Without this show, Euphoria wouldn't have been a thing almost a decade later, and viewers wouldn't have ever found out about Skins UK. I think this version of Skins gets way less credit than it deserves and for all the hard work these unseasoned actors & actresses put in, it surely deserves more praise and they deserved better. I hope one day this version of Skins will find a resurgence among our youth but also the world in general, and I hope that wherever most of the cast is today that they are doing well, truly, because it seems little to no information can be found about them online past this show. Please don't hesitate to watch this show once or twice through, you might find more to appreciate about it than you think.