What's happening with MTV's "Skins" experiment?

When I heard that American television was going to produce an American version of the popular BBC show "Skins," I had fairly low expectations. I was never interested in the British version. It's just not the kind of show that I'm interested in. I've had my teen drama, and I'm not interested in reliving those days.  Even so, I knew enough about the show from the advertisements to know what to expect. I love British television, and American television has a long history of "borrowing" ideas from across the pond. "Life on Mars," Who's Line?," and "All in the Family" are just a few examples of shows that started overseas. Some of the ideas do very well and others just flop. I think part of it comes down to familiarity. I would hate to see an American version of "Doctor Who", and I think this is part of the problem we are seeing with "Skins."

So let's talk a minute about why it's an issue for "Skins" to be a really popular television show already. Ever since BBC America has hit the air, American audiences have massive exposure to at least the BBC variety of shows so they already know what to expect. Take a truly American example like the SciFi (it was SciFi at the time) reboot of Battlestar Galactica. The writers for the show made a choice to reimagine Starbuck. They chose to take the male character originally played by Dirk Benedict and make the character a female played by Katee Sackhoff. This was a choice that they made that I think worked out well. It provided a new dynamic to the show that let it explore a variety of issues that a male Starbuck wouldn't have been able to address. "Skins" has a similar issue.

First let's consider how Battlestar Galactica avoided problems with the gender change. Rather than ignore it, they actually advertised the change. I remember an add where both Starbucks are playing cards and Benedict makes a comment about how in his day Starbuck was a guy. They didn't try to pull the wool over the eyes of the audience, even though the original show had been off the air for decades. "Skins" on the other hand changed the gender of one of the major characters to avoid complaints. From what I've heard from friends of mine who were huge fans of the British version, the character that was changed was a lesbian. I think the producers didn't want to deal with the questions that might come up from the character so they simply changed her into a guy so it wouldn't be a problem, but there's the problem. People loved the original character and aren't happy with the change.

There are tons of other problems with this show being brought to American television that I won't get into now since I don't follow either show, but I think I've made my point. The American version of "Skins" will probably be off the air in a few weeks and this won't even be an issue anymore.

Take my opinion for what it's worth. Feel free to comment below if you have something you want to add to the discussion.