‘Skins’ pushing boundaries of teen drama — like really

Every parent's nightmare.

It's not some catastrophic childhood illness. It's not drunken drivers, drug dealers or online perverts. It's not even the thought that their little bundle of joy could one day fall in love with a middle-age Tila Tequila on "A Shot at Love 37."

Every parent's nightmare is, according to the Boston Herald, The CW's "Gossip Girl." And the network couldn't be more pleased.

To promote the teen drama's upcoming second season, The CW is pasting that and some of the show's other incendiary reviews -- "Mind-blowingly inappropriate," "Very bad for you" -- over pictures of its young characters in various stages of getting it on.

That's a pretty good sign that "Gossip Girl" will be ratcheting up its sex-drugs-and-emo story lines, if for no other reason than to beat back the challenge from its new sister series, "90210."

With both shows likely looking to out-flaunt, out-party and out-OMG! each other, I'm envisioning some sort of East Coast-West Coast rivalry that ends with both casts meeting in the middle for a spring break-themed sweeps stunt ... and then burning Missouri to the ground and snorting the ashes.

But no matter what escalating series of debauchery the two shows have in mind, they've likely already lost the youth-gone-wild race to BBC America's "Skins" (9 p.m. today).

Granted, every generation thinks the one that follows is out of control. I'm sure there were viewers who were outraged by the way Larry Mondello always led The Beav astray, just as there surely were some who just didn't like the looks of that Cockroach that hung around Theo Huxtable.

But at the risk of turning into a bathrobe-and-slippers-wearing, "Hey you kids, get off of my lawn" fogey, I don't know that I want my TV teens to get any worse than the ones on "Skins."

Today's premiere plays out like one of those shoestring-budget, maxed-out-your-meager-credit-card films that hits Sundance every few years, wows audiences and scares the hell out of the conservative press.

"Skins," which focuses on a group of teens in Bristol, England, includes scenes of voyeurism, exhibitionism, pornography, masturbation, casual sex and plans for much, much more casual sex. And that's all before the first commercial break.

But by the opening scene of episode two -- when the entire cast wakes up after a party, in their underwear and covered in what looks to be a combination of pasta and applesauce, having destroyed a perfectly good house in the process -- you realize that unlike previous boundary-pushing teen dramas, there's no moral center here. No Brenda or Brandon from the original "90210." No Ryan or Seth from "The O.C." No Humphrey clan from "Gossip Girl."

"Skins" goes on to defy most of the other conventions of the U.S. teen dramas its young writers, whose average age is 22, clearly watched. The main characters are all working class, they're all less heartthrob than hooligan, and the writing is far more raw than clever. (One exception: The popular Tony (Nicholas Hoult) is asked why he's been hanging around the posh girls school across the way. "I say this world extends way beyond this little field of dreams we're dancing in," he says, "and I want to see that world." Someone wonders if that's from Shakespeare. Nope, he's told, it's "Dawson's Creek.")

"Skins" is littered with F-bombs, C-bombs, and plenty of bombs I wasn't even aware had corresponding letters. (Those have been edited for the U.S., but the many S-words survived the journey.) It's also chock-full of nudity, although the frontal scenes have been pixilated, cropped or cut entirely since they first aired in England.

If "Gossip Girl" really is every parent's nightmare, airing "Skins" in its entirety in the United States would lead to riots in the streets.

Until one of its Upper East Siders does a line of blow off Dakota Fanning while harvesting organs from political prisoners at a cockfight, "Gossip Girl" won't even come close.

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Sundays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.