Many TV shows struggling to find a following work out different ways to build a connection between its characters and audience which typically comes about by strong personality-driven episodes and the slow unraveling of their pasts. If the audience doesn’t care about the characters, they don’t care about the show. In Volume 1 and Volume 2 of Skins managed to keep us deeply involved in the lives of the troubled teens that populated its world of sex and drugs, but it wasn’t a success they wanted to dwell on. So with the third season they got a new batch of characters (centered on the younger sister of one of the main characters from the original bunch). With those characters established, we move on to the fourth season and unlike the first two, there’s just not enough interest in the characters to keep people coming back.
If you’re going to make an apt comparison between the original cast and the new cast, then you have to judge their freshman and sophomore seasons against one another. Granted, the second season with the first cast was scattered, but it adequately mirrored the dissonance that had emerged in the social circle. Friendships were crumbling, niche roles switching, and in the bittersweet ending of it all was the perfect conclusion for the whole mess. The second season with this new cast stumbles due to not only an insufficient hook to grapple the audience from the get-go but also because their first season (season three) never instilled them with the same strength as was given to the original cast. Consequently, the second season sort of fizzles midway through and the season becomes a holding pattern, just waiting to shoo this group out the door and bring in a new cast.
At the center of the season’s plots is the aftermath of the suicide of a girl named Sophia at a nightclub in the opening of the first episode and how it affects various characters throughout the season, the secretive love of Emily (Kathryn Prescott) and Naomi (Lily Loveless), the rise and fall of Katie (Megan Prescott) as the group’s alpha female, and of course the return of Effy (Kaya Scodelario) and the gradual decay of her mental state in the wake of all she’s seen and done as the main recurring character of the first four seasons. In the middle of it all, you have Cook (Jack O’Connell), Freddie (Luke Pasqualino), JJ (Ollie Barbieri), and Thomas (Merveille Lukeba) all flailing about trying to make relationships with various girls work after the love polygon of the last season exploded.
The beginning and midsection of the season leave much to be desired, but by the time the season comes to a head in its second to last episode, the characters are just starting to get into something beyond basic teenage drama. It’s too late to redeem the second generation to the level of the first, but the drama gets a significant boost and brings the season’s standing up to a memorable level, albeit in a somewhat traumatic way. This generation never had its Tony getting hit by a bus moment, nor the haunting musical closing for the season, but in its final moments on screen it offered a little bit of a pay-off for the fans who waited patiently for this batch to find its stride.
A variety of guest stars pepper the season, including Morwenna Banks, Ronni Ancona, Chris Addison, Tanya Franks, Paul Kaye, Pauline Quirke, Simon Day, Dudley Sutton, Hugo Speer, Jenny Eclair and Will Young.
DVD Bonus Features
The 8-episode set comes with audio commentaries, and then some cast interviews and character shorts to act as inter-episode filler.
If you’ve followed the show through season 3 thus far, there’s no reason not to bear and grin it through the fourth, because if you don’t all of the suffering through the nauseating teenage heartbreak drama of the third season will have been for naught.
"Skins: Volume 4" is on sale January 11, 2011 and is not rated. Comedy, Drama. Directed by Neil Biswas, Esther Campbell, Philippa Langdale, Daniel OHara. Written by Bryan Elsley, Jamie Brittain, Christopher E.C. Hill, Georgia Lester, Isy Suttie, . Starring Kaya Scodelario, Ollie Barbieri, Luke Pasqualino, Jack OConnell, Kathryn Prescott, Lisa Backwell, Lily Loveless, Megan Prescott, Merveille Lukeba.
