The Details

Skins

Mondays, 1o p.m., MTV

The teen characters on MTV’s remake of the British drama Skins drink, smoke, swear, take drugs and have lots of sex, depicted in a manner clearly meant to shock audiences and remind them that MTV was once the network of bold, controversial risk-taking and not just Jersey Shore and Teen Mom. But Skins feels less bold than desperate, overcompensating by keeping its characters in a constant state of inebriated arousal. Rather than a raw, honest depiction of teenage life, Skins is salacious and pandering, with mannered dialogue that often sounds awkward coming from the cast of neophyte actors (it doesn’t help that some of the British scripts were imported directly). Its occasionally affecting emotional moments are undermined by over-the-top set pieces, making Skins neither a revealing look at the perils of adolescence nor a reliably amusing guilty pleasure. The shock wears off quickly, leaving nothing much behind.