Showing skin

You gotta love a show that can upstage MTV's raunchy reality hit, Jersey Shore.

Skins has done it.

In a week of TV happenings that included Ricky Gervais going comedically postal at the Golden Globes and the return of American Idol, Skins soared to most-talked-about status, even reducing the reprise of attention-sucking Jersey Shore to the level, for the moment, of "Snooki who?"

Way to go, MTV! For a network that's no stranger to provocative fare or controversy, here's another buzz-blessed smash!

Most people know by now that Skins is a steamy scripted drama about overwrought teens, spun off from the acclaimed British series of the same name. It began its 10-episode season last Monday on the wings of heavy promotion by MTV, generally positive reviews and high anticipation by its young target audience.

There was also a smattering of pre-opening outcry, mainly as an inevitable protest from the Parents Television Council, a TV watchdog group. It declared that "Skins may well be the most dangerous television show for children that we have ever seen," which had to be as welcome a critical rave as MTV could wish.

The premiere of Skins drew 3.3 million viewers, 1.2 million of them under 18, the Nielsen Co reported. This was a robust turnout, though hardly in the league of Jersey Shore, which, a week ago, seized 8.4 million viewers for its Season 3 debut.

But this is only the beginning for Skins. With its new wave of publicity, it has nowhere to go but up.

On Thursday, a front-page story in The New York Times introduced the notion that Skins may — with the emphasis on "may" — be trafficking in kiddie porn.

Skins producers have boasted of its gritty realism. In that spirit, many of the teenage characters are played by actors who are 17 or younger, and therefore legally minors.

‘Tone down the content'

Executives at MTV "in recent days" have become concerned that some scenes "may violate federal child pornography statutes", the Times reported, without naming those executives.

Faced with the possibility that future episodes of the show may be breaking the law, those unnamed MTV executives "ordered the producers to make changes to tone down some of the most explicit content", the Times reported.

Oddly, the only potentially problematic scene the Times identified occurs in the third episode, airing on January 31. Jesse Carere, a 17-year-old actor playing the tragicomic character Chris, is shown from behind, naked, striding down the street. In the preview of that episode provided to critics, the played-for-laughs sequence lasts about 10 seconds, and it's impossible to tell whether Carere was really in the buff when shooting the scene.

In the face of brewing controversy, MTV said Skins is a show "that addresses real-world issues confronting teens in a frank way.

"We review all of our shows and work with all of our producers on an ongoing basis to ensure our shows comply with laws and community standards," the statement continued.

"We are confident that the episodes of Skins will not only comply with all applicable legal requirements, but also with our responsibilities to our viewers."

No explicit scenes

Any scenes that might leave MTV, well, exposed will be up to the lawyers to determine, if it comes to that. In the four episodes shared with critics, Skins shows almost no skin. Despite all the talk of sex, there is almost no explicit sex depicted.

Nonetheless, by raising the spectre of kiddie porn, the Times story made Skins notorious with new urgency. And it gave the show's detractors a fresh new front for attack.

Within hours of the story, the PTC called for the US Senate and House Judiciary Committees and the Department of Justice to "immediately open an investigation regarding child pornography and exploitation on MTV's Skins".

Meanwhile, Taco Bell announced it would pull its advertising from Skins. Though Taco Bell will be missing, Skins will air its second episode in the US on Monday. People who would never have considered watching it, who may never have even heard of it until the current uproar, will likely be there sampling in droves.

They'll be watching a show that may or may not have been edited to correct what may or may not have broken the law, but has clearly gotten under everybody's skin.

As a publicity spectacle, this couldn't be going better if MTV had masterminded it.