Overall Quality of Skins
The previous media I have spoken about are widely considered masterpieces, part of the Western cinematic canon.
Sure, my choice of THEM over other films in the ‘canon’ was a personal preference, but they are part of the canon.
Skins is categorically ‘not’ considered one of the ‘greatest television shows ever made’, and in aggregate, I don’t think it is either, as ‘best’ and ‘favourite’ are different.
It’s considered a ‘solid show’ up until the last 2 episodes of season 4, but by no means a masterpiece.
It’s not original in its concept, being a pretty typical teen show only marked out by how ‘shocking’ it was in 2007 for showing minors engaged in drugs and sex. The writing is extremely uneven. Past season 1 there are flatulence ‘jokes’ which I always have to skip. The last 2 episodes of season 4 are an atrocious nosedive in quality which taint the series, particularly season 4, as a whole.
So, why am I talking about it? Isn’t it an insult to talk about something as mundane, run-of-the-mill, merely ‘watchable’ right after talking about two cinematic landmarks?
Mostly personal reasons, and the journey I had with this show since I watched it last year.
However, despite this article being somewhat of an indulgence, something of a ‘two worlds colliding’ novelty between my TikTok edits and my Substack, I will insist the great episodes and great scenes, and the great moments, ARE great.
I don’t expect any of my readers here to have seen this show, particularly non-British readers. That is okay, I will give you the best overview I can.
The ‘Generations’
The first ‘generation’ (Gen 1) is seasons 1 and 2, one set of characters, made and set between 2007 and 2008.
Then the second ‘generation’ (Gen 2) is seasons 3 and 4, with mostly different characters, made and set between 2009 and 2010.
However, the connecting thread is Effy Stonem, the little sister of one of the main characters (and arguably the ‘antagonist’) of Gen 1, Tony Stonem. She’s a supporting character in the first generation and then THE main character in the second generation.
I personally feel they handled the cast shift very well, by introducing one of Effy’s friends, Pandora, another main Gen 2 character, in season 2.
Also Effy was such a cool character IN gen 1, the ultimate ‘dark beauty’, I didn’t mind immediately binging Gen 2 after Gen 1 because she is portrayed in Gen 1 as the most enigmatic character that you desperately want to know more about.
Effectively, the way I like to see it, Gen 1 is ‘Breaking Bad’, and Gen 2 is ‘Better Call Saul’, with Effy as Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGee.
I didn’t finish Better Call Saul and couldn’t quite get into it (maybe I’ll eventually give it another try) but it is considered a spin-off in the same league as its original, hence why I’m making the comparison.
The Alternate Universe of the 2000s
Skins is a show made, and therefore set, in the late 2000s, when I was a little boy.
The teenage media that often most resonates with you I have found is that which was made BEFORE you were a teenager, but you knew people who were teenagers and you aspired to be like them.
For instance, a teen film my dad particularly likes is ‘Quadrophenia’ (1979), and this is a great film. There is only one year of difference between how he remembers the 70s and how I remember the 00s (he was 1970, I was 2001).
But there is something really quite strange about the 2000s, when you look back on it, and you look at other eras before it. The first season of Skins came out nearly 20 years ago, in 2007.
Comparing the late 2000s and today, and then comparing the late 2000s and the late 1980s, it’s clear that there was far MORE change, in terms of technology and day-to-day life, from the late 1980s to the late 2000s compared to the late 2000s and today.
In many ways, the setting of Skins is very familiar. They all have mobile phones, if far more primitive than the ones I’m writing this on. They use video calling, and their day-to-day lives are similar to ours.
And yet, it also feels very ‘subtly’ different. The platforms are different. The fashion is different. It feels ‘parallel’ almost as much as ‘in the past’. A parallel reality where the world was a bit less cynical and depressing.
It weirdly gives me nostalgia for my childhood AND my time in sixth form. In particular, because there was a major fashion shift from 07 to 09, which hadn’t changed nearly as much by 2018 as between those two years, Gen 1 reminds me more of my childhood, and Gen 2 very much of my time at sixth form college.
Video above: A TikTok edit of Skins to the Windows 95 opening theme, not by me. I talked about that in my Blade Runner review, of being eerily similar to the Vangelis score to that movie. But it also reminds me a lot of being a child in the 2000s, and captures my ‘feeling’ of watching a lot of Gen 1, particularly Michelle’s fashion that is very distinctly ‘Y2K’. The ‘Y2K Futurism’ era of futurism, or at the very least ‘related’ aesthetics, seemed to last from the 1980s all the way to 2010.
Gen 1 reminded me of the super cool teenagers back when I was a kid, I was like ‘I WISH I was that age’ to my mum, ‘how come THEY get to do cool things?’, ‘what if by the time I’M that age the world is ruined’?
Turns out that wasn’t a baseless fear.
The Trauma of Covid Lockdowns
Before I’d even seen Skins, I knew the ‘ideal’ Skins was trying to portray.
I actually didn’t want to watch it as a teenager.
I started watching the first episode and was triggered by Tony making fun of Sid for being a virgin at the start of the first episode, that I was terrified I would be for the rest of my life.
It was as if I was ‘almost’ getting to that feeling of being ‘there’, into the ‘cool group’, by the time I was in sixth form.
And looking at it retroactively, after I’ve seen the show, my friend group in the second half of my first year at sixth form were quite a bit like characters from Skins.
But then, in my second year, where I had different friends but was quite a popular guy, finally, after all these years of humiliation and self-loathing, Covid struck.
This isn’t going to be a tirade of self-pity about the Covid lockdowns, I wasn’t the only person badly affected, and a lot of people were worse affected than me.
But it did sever me from all of my friendships there and caused deep, long lasting resentment. Resentment at this was unquestionably part of me making Anglofuturist in the first place, as it furthered political radicalisation.
Skins was actually part of me moving past that, allowing both my memories, and a whole framework of ‘ideals’, to be immortalised through the medium of TikTok edits, other people’s and my own, in a kind of liminal, spiritual, dreamlike reality, without me having to regret the past, of ‘how my teenage years should have been’, but yet, at the same time, the hollowness and fleeting nature of those ideals.
Some of the cinematography, and their re-editing for TikTok edits, almost inspired a latent ‘mysticism’ within me, activated by aesthetics.
It may have gone some way to getting me to turn to religion, as weird as it sounds that a show about endless sex and drug use can make you think of God.
But it was more a feeling of parallel reality, liminality, and non-linear time, of the 2000s being ‘parallel’ rather than linear in the past compared to our own time, as I explained.
Discovery on TikTok
Video above: A classic Skins edit, not by me, but one of the first I watched. It is seared in my mind forever as something almost transcendent, and was shown to me by the algo because of my pre-existent interest in dreamcore.
I did not watch the show until last year, when I was on ‘Aesthetic TikTok’ (vaporwave, dreamcore, liminal spaces, etcetera) after deleting Anglofuturist and wanting to retreat into fantastical, comforting worlds.
Having deleted Anglofuturist, I desperately wanted something to capture my imagination ‘outside’ politics, and it settled on a combination of aesthetics and my own memories of my own life and dreams of ages-gone-by.
The algorithm directed to eerie, ambient Effy Stonem edits and I thought ‘I have to watch this show’, they awakened this feeling of mysticism. I’ll have to post edits on this Substack to emphasise what I mean.
My major creative outlet during this time was doing TikTok edits, which deeply resonated with me so much that I went to all the trouble of downloading the whole series in mp4 format from a dodgy website so I could make my own edits.
You can find my page here. I also repost a lot of cool aesthetic-related stuff.
I made edits of the show to dreamy electronic music, facilitating escapism, building my own ‘fantasy realities’, often romantic in character, whilst practicing my video editing skills, leading me on to do a video editing work experience placement in late 2025.
Effy Stonem
I’m an absolute simp for Effy, I freely admit it.
I described my attraction to the character of Effy in a comment to a TikTok which I think sums it up well;
‘Effy was the kind of girl who, as a teenager, was so much cooler than me, that I’d immediately feel emasculated in her presence, yet that was precisely what made me have a crush on her’.
Yes, manosphere rule 101, girls never are attracted to guys who are less cool than them. “Thou shalt not be a simp for baddies.”
But god that’s fucking boring. Am I not allowed to at least dream? Or are even my dreams now forbidden or else I’ll be called ‘cuck’?
I don’t give a fuck anymore. The ‘concern trolling’ manosphere snake oil merchants can go fuck themselves and be homosexual whilst I enjoy dominant bad girls.
Effy Stonem is so mysterious in the first season. The seventh episode of the first season, where she’s properly introduced as this danger-loving, ‘wild’ almost ‘force of nature’, I’d say is when the show becomes ‘great’, suddenly a lot more dramatic.
The scene with her brother’s girlfriend, Michelle Richardson, in front of a lake at the beginning of episode 8, is beautifully shot and acted, with so many layers to it. (Scene below)
In seasons 3 and 4 you realise just how mentally unwell she is, and puts her boyfriend, Freddie McClaire, through absolute hell, though I’ve never seen a nosedive in quality of a series within a season like here, where one of the best episodes of the series is only two episodes away from the worst, (the moment ‘Silence of the Lambs’ Dr. John Foster is introduced, the genre shift is so jarring it’s impossible to connect them.)
Effy Stonem the classic ‘BPD girlfriend’ that I see a lot of ‘Chudstack’ romanticising recently even though I’ve tuned out of a lot of that.
The ‘idea’ of her is titillating, and then the reality becomes a nightmare.
I talked about this ‘idea of a woman’ vs ‘the real woman as your girlfriend’ in my review of ‘Obsession’.
Gen 2 and Sixth Form College ‘Deja Vu’
Gen 2 gives me an eerie deja vu of my own time in sixth form college.
JJ fused with a bit of Sid in Gen 1 was who I WAS, Cook was who I ASPIRED to be with far less success.
Both Emily Fitch and Naomi Campbell are amalgamations of girls I KNEW when I was a teenager.
Effy was the type of girl I fantasised about, Emily seemed the type of girl that seemed ‘reachable’.
Naomi in season 3 is the 2000s equivalent of what we now call Woke, but I liked her anyway, I think because she reminded me of a specific girl, who didn’t like me much but was very intelligent and ‘fair’.
I love the scene where Cook is voted college president (I tried to run for college council when I was in sixth form, on a platform of ‘no ketchup or wooden fork charges in the canteen’, in an arrogant fuckery way like Cook, but did not win), and she refuses to rig the vote in her favour.
I’m very partial to people who fundamentally engage in ‘fair play’ to their political opponents. Sure, she becomes a bitch in the next season for cheating on Emily, but I like her here.
I think there’s a deeply ingrained British sentiment of fairness, of respect for democratic outcomes, that even quite Woke people like Naomi respect, unlike liberal Americans that hold it in contempt.
Am I reading far too much into this? Almost certainly. But I am writing ‘stream of consciousness’ of what comes to mind, not constrained by serious media criticism or essay structure.
Romantic Fantasy
And there’s something, despite some undercurrents of Wokeism, really quite ‘English’ about Naomi and Emily.
I love the scene near the lake, Emily quipping sarcastically whilst pulling out a cigarette.
I can understand why many lesbians are attracted to ‘cottagecore’, precisely because it ‘isn’t’ especially political, it’s more just ‘wanting to escape’.
This softened my hostility to LGBT, feeling a common ground of wanting to ‘escape’ from the hostile world.
Sadly, as per the clusterfuck that is Reddit and progressive purity tests, I was mistaken in feeling any sympathy or to soften any of my defences, as they will make sure to alienate me to the maximum possible extent. But I still feel common ground with the characters in the Skins, and my own internal universe.
It’s why it all feels so real, yet also a fantasy reality.
When Emily befriends JJ in what is presumably CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services), it reminds me of many girls I knew as a teenager in that mental health service.
The moment where she boldly orders JJ to have sex with her has been a perpetual sexual fantasy since I saw the show, precisely because it was something imaginable, it was as if my ‘teenage fantasy was being put to film’ (scene below).
Some annoying Woke women on Reddit were like ‘that shouldn’t happen, she’s a LESBIAN’ and I said ‘well she’s obviously bisexual’ (sadly my sister I watched it with adopted that BS, very disappointing though she’s my sister so I still love her) and, as per post-2015 Reddit, I was downvoted and eventually banned.
But it fills me with GLEE that I made a TikTok edit of them together, it got over 20,000 likes, and before any ‘but she’s a lesbian’ ‘respect her sexuality!’ comments can get any likes on my TikTok,
The description for one of the videos literally says ‘I will never stop shipping them. It stirred something deep within me. Cope’. (Two videos I made below, TikTok link here and here)
If Effy is like the ‘dark side’ of my sexual subconscious, Emily Fitch represents the ‘light side’, with that ‘light’ still having some sarcasm, assertiveness, and deadpan humour.
If Dialgatime321 says the late 2000s and early 2010s were a brief moment of pop culture where autistic and non-chad guys might have had a chance with attractive ‘bad girl’, Gen 2 Skins is the perfect example of this.
The fact Effy chooses Freddie, the ultimate bad girl/soft boy pairing, and Michelle and Sid in Gen 1, is a case in point.
Michelle breaks up with asshole ‘chad’ Tony who meets ‘divine justice’ and ‘karma’ being hit by a bus, and initiates sex with Sid and who ‘makes her cum’.
Was it propaganda and cope?
Probably.
But I’d much rather pretend that it might have been, could have been, the smallest, tiniest, non-existent chance it could have been real, than to undergo the demoralising Manosphere ‘realism’ and want to hang myself (rhetorically).
But anyway, I’ll just drop in a bomb that one girl I knew from CAMHs, who I quite fancied, killed herself by throwing herself onto a railway track.
That was a shocking experience, and after that, I’ve never even flippantly thought about suicide.
Emily is like a fusion of that girl, and some others I spoke to.
Emily almost throws herself off a building as well…
The Objectively Good Things About Skins
So, I may be talking about it like a guilty pleasure, and watching it for the attractive girls in it almost like reading erotic literature.
But, I will give it its due, and attempt to defend my liking of it.
I think the show is great at depicting the nasty realities of mental health and drug use.
I don’t think it is actually pro-drugs like it is often portrayed as being. It is more that teenagers use drugs as coping mechanisms for where society doesn’t ‘get’ them.
Chris Miles’ death in the end of season 2 is heavily implied to be due to negligence and poor management of his health related to his drug use, the heavy drug use worsen Effy’s pre-existing mental health problems, leading her to attempt suicide in the middle of season 4.
In a masterstroke of filmmaking, in season 3 episode 8, the episode in the woods, in extremely terrifying detail, the audience is made to feel like they are experiencing the hallucinogenic trip first-hand, like in ‘Trainspotting’ (1996).
And there is nothing ‘fun’ about this, as the audience experiences the horrific consequences.
Effy thinks she has murdered Katie Fitch, Emily’s twin sister (who did play on her trip confusion and attacked her first).
There’s a shot of her in the bath towards the end of the episode, her mother washing her hair, floods of tears coming out, and it just hits you because this is how one reacts when they think ‘my life could be forever changed by this one mistake’.
Luckily for Effy, Katie isn’t dead. But the way it’s handled is phenomenal, as tragedies really do happen when teenagers are alone in the woods together doing mushrooms.
The actors and actresses in both generations are all great, there isn’t a single one that is ‘bad’, which is even more impressive given that they all were the ages of the characters they played when it was filmed. It’s the actors and the characters, and the dialogue between them, particularly one-to-one scenes, that really drive the show in my opinion.
The cinematography is also absolutely beautiful on multiple occasions, as well as the music choices that go with that cinematography.
It’s status as one of my favourite series, and the one I was passionate about to create a whole TikTok edit page, is the ‘mood’ that is created in some of the quieter dialogue scenes.
JJ’s episode, season 3 episode 7, isn’t just good because it resonates with me, but because it is one of the most cinematic and dramatic episodes in the series, a sombre mood from being set to the music of Debussy.
If you do watch it, you need to watch it with the original soundtrack, not the rubbish replacement music. The Debussy music is still there for season 3 episode 7, but some of the pop songs of the era they had to remove for copyright reasons give scenes their emotional power, like the very ending scene of generation 1 to ‘Time to Pretend’ which beautifully shows the fact that our teenage years, and the connections we make, really are a flash in the pan.
The show is best in its quieter, more sensitive moments, those one-on-one character scenes, rather than when it is loud and bombastic, and tries to be a comedy. The best ‘comedy’, which is by far best handled in season 1, is often equally mixed up with a level of ‘disturbing’, or just very human interactions. But by season 2 some of the humour gets a lot more childish and the show really suffers for that.
It’s why I actually loved Cassie’s ‘Pure’ (2013) feature a fair bit, the only season 7 feature they did which actually felt even slightly similar to the series.
Despite the show being poorly threaded together, particularly by the last three episodes of season 4, there are moments of great writing, beyond the aforementioned portrayal of autism with JJ and ADHD/being an ordinary ‘non-chad’ guy with Sid.
Video above: An edit I made, to the music of Electronic Gems: HOME - Resonance and using filters. Effy supports her now disabled older brother.
Tony Stonem’s accident is a great portrayal of ‘karma’, of what goes around comes around. It isn’t something which is ‘provable’, a lot of the time scumbags do get away with it, it’s the same thing as believing in heaven and hell, but it is important for cultures to repeat this mantra of ‘sociopathic chad fuckboys who manipulate others will get cosmic justice’, precisely because, many times they don’t.
There’s a David Lynch-style surrealist episode with Tony in season 2, which some people will love, and some people will just be confused by, but shows a real cinematic knowledge from the creators.
Obviously, you don’t wish ‘having to learn to walk again’ on your worst enemy, but as a cultural message, of divine retribution for the unvirtuous, it’s powerful.
I feel sorry for Tony Stonem as a human being, but I don’t think he will have truly changed if it hadn’t happened to him, the experience of no longer being a ‘chad’ in the lottery game that is nature. I think it’s still questionable whether he did really change, but hopefully, he won’t be so quick to manipulate others.
His parents, and his sister Effy, are clearly destroyed by the ordeal, and to be honest, I feel more sorry for them than I do for him.
Effy is ‘selective mute’ in season 1, she has to step up and care for her brother by season 2 and so is no longer selective mute, but it’s hard not to wonder if that selective mutism wasn’t a coping mechanism, and without it, her drug use worsened and leads to her attempted suicide in the fourth season.
What makes this even better is that Tony Stonem is actually seen reading ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ by Friedrich Nietzsche in the first season, when he is being the ‘master morality’ archetype, i.e., without perennial understandings of morality, showing Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain, who created the show, had high philosophical literacy.
Whilst I am a moral anti-realist, I do believe in a kind of ‘perennial ethical code’ where those who think they are better than others, and are inconsiderate to others, deserve rebuke.
There’s some other good plotlines as well. This was Dev Patel’s big break, and he plays a Muslim guy, Anwar, with a gay best friend, Maxie, who has to reconcile the difficulties surrounding who he is, his ethnic background and the culture around him.
His father is actually a very great character, obviously far more devout than he is, but because he is not ‘of’ the culture, but has a more detached perspective, he is more accepting of Maxie without having to full-on embrace his worldview, a beautiful line in the final episode of season 1 is ‘there are things in this world that I don’t understand, but that is okay, I have my God, and one day, He will make it make sense to me’.
I think that’s a rather beautiful line of pluralism and peaceful co-existence, though of course the activists would say it’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ which they think is ‘oppressive’ because they want to throw their weight around, it is a line I find quite profound.
It’s also interesting contrasting the first generation immigrant to the second generation immigrant, Anwar is ‘of’ the British culture in the way his father is not, so his father CAN be more tolerant because he’s still with a ‘when in Rome, do as the Roman’s do’ mindset, that second generation immigrants struggle with.
Conclusion
So, I hope I have given sufficient justification for why I like it so much.
Once again, it isn’t ‘Breaking Bad’ or ‘The Sopranos’ or the first 10 seasons of ‘The Simpsons’, but it resonated a lot with me, its new lease of life on TikTok gave me a means of escapism when I was going through a difficult time.
It allowed me to compartmentalise my memories of sixth form college and not have them, the lost opportunities and the cutting short just when I was about to get there with Covid lockdowns, control me.
That may sound weird, over-dramatic, and cringe, and I’m sorry if it did. My only defence will be to leave you with this message:
But I was happy to get an opportunity to discuss my love of this show.
In addition to giving my TikTok link for anybody remotely curious, I will also link a Google Drive folder to many edits of others which really ‘seared the show into my consciousness’ probably just as much as the show itself did.
I’ll see you next time, for a more serious and less personal article.