“Skins” Gets Axed, Just Like Franky

As Skins barrels through the endless bender of its sixth season, The Guardian is reporting that Channel 4 has confirmed that the controversial series will die (probably in a car crash) in 2013.

A Channel 4 spokesperson told The Guardian: “Skins is a brilliant show which has defined a generation and will go down as a truly iconic, game-changing piece of television but after seven series it is time for E4 to make way for the next generation of the bold, the new and the innovative.” Next year three more episodes will air, and the Channel 4 Rep says, “We think Skins has gone as far as we can take it, but we know fans will be disappointed. So we think three episodes to really celebrate the series is a good send-off.”

MSN reports that 2011 was a rough year for the franchise, saying that “the American version proved too controversial, and was axed after only a couple of episodes,” which isn’t actually true — MTV aired the complete season and then cancelled it, but the controversy if anything only amped up interest in the show. The American Skins‘ fatal flaw was that it totally sucked. Like it sucked so bad it needed a whole new word for “suck.”

In the UK, Skins‘ ratings have been rolling gallantly downhill all season. MSN, apparently very short on fact-checkers yesterday, said that “last night’s finale” (It wasn’t the finale, it was only Episode seven of a 10-episode season) “was seen by just 630,000 people, a loss of over 40% of its launch audience.” They also report that Season Six debuted to the show’s lowest ever overnight average — a huge loss for a show that premiered in 2007 to 1.7 million viewers.

MSN theorizes: “Over five years in, and it seemed as if the writers were running short of the kind of fresh ideas that made the first couple of series so watchable. In this day and age, it’s perhaps difficult to appreciate just how groundbreaking Skins was when it first premiered. However, in its prime, it was a groundbreaking show for young people, devised by young people and played by young people.”

But is that really it? Now that the ground has been broken, we’re no longer moved by Skins‘ central concept? I don’t think so. There are definitely elements of the show’s premise less suited for a 2012 audience than a 2007 one, and I’ll get to those later, but perhaps MSN is the most accurate when they suggest “the new cast – including the likes of Dakota Blue Richards, Alex Arnold, Sean Teale, Freya Mavor and Jessica Sula – polarised fans. Some were enamoured with them, others weren’t.”

Obviously the new cast never shone quite so dirty-bright as the previous two but Season Five had its moments — more specifically, it had Franky.

In Season Five, Skins unexpectedly found a way to break new ground with Franky; a delicately beautiful girl with nervous eyes, a wild angry vulnerability and a distinctly androgynous style. Although Franky never used the word herself, many viewers immediately identified her as “genderqueer,” which we don’t see on television, really, not ever. When asked whether she’s into girls or boys or both, Franky responds — with a rare assuredness for her — “I’m into people.”

Franky, who was bullied at her old school, is quickly harassed at her new one, too, but by Season Five’s end had meshed into a new gang and a new love triangle — or dodechahedron, really — dominated by Matty the Emo Brooder and Franky’s new best friend, the bitchy-because-she’s-needy Mini.

It was thrilling, that unexpected sexual tension with Mini, and it made perfect sense, it really did, that Mini’s initial twatdom towards Franky was rooted in internalized homophobia. Although I’m holding out hope that episode nine, “Mini & Franky,” will basically be the two of them on ecstasy in bed making collages in their underpants, thus far last year’s sexual tension has vanished into the ether along with Franky’s Oxfords.

Season Six debuts with the gang, clearly unfamiliar with photographs, telephones and TripAdvisor.com, vacationing in Morocco at a hotel situation that lacks beds, water, a functional pool, toilets or anything they’d allegedly paid for. When Franky and Matty, now officially together, pulled up in their Jeep, my eyeballs fell out of my face, mostly because I had no idea Dakota Blue Richards had such an impressive rack…

…but also because she didn’t look like Franky anymore.

S6’s stylist: “[This season] we’ll see [Franky] take control of who she is. Gone are the button up shirts, Franky has started to embrace her sexuality and she’s not afraid of exposing some flesh and finally being noticed by all.”

This is how Franky’s style was described last year: “Her sartorial experiments defy all gender expectations and she’ll plunder from all ages of fashion if it feels right, from old-man trousers via romantic tail coats to Teddy Boy’s brothel creepers.”

“I liked [Franky] better when she might or might not be lesbian.”
– Mini, Episode 601

Yeah, me too. How did we go from this…

To this?

There’s nothing implausible about Franky’s turnaround, but it’s super-disappointing, and Skins‘ insistence that her new style reflects new confidence is both confusing and problematic. If S5’s Franky was confident about anything, it was probably her outfits. She wasn’t throwing shit on to cover herself up, she was a Dapper Fucking Q, that woman. She clearly had a passion for a certain kind of fashion.

See, part of what made Franky so fun and revolutionary and compelling was that she disregarded the “femme = sexy” hierarchy and when peers suggested her style reflected insecurity/discomfort, Franky insisted otherwise — no, it was just her. When she felt peer-pressured into wearing makeup and a girly tank top to school in Season Five, she quickly broke down over it: “I tried today and now I feel kind of less like me, and I’m not exactly over the moon about being me in the first place, but now I think I kinda like it less when I’m trying NOT to be me. Because I just wanna like, be.”

We admired her deviance and weirdoness, which seems to be subsumed this season by a self-destructive streak that begins pre-Death-of-Grace, although its root is never truly fleshed out. Real talk: They’re trying to make Franky into Effy. Right? I mean, they’ve just sort of stuffed a bunch of Effy into Franky’s body and are running with it. Couldn’t they have picked someone else?

Also, as of Episode Seven, Franky’s already slept with three guys and has yet to fingerfuck Mini in a dirty city alley. So Franky joins the ranks of “female characters who are theoretically attracted to all genders but only actually date men in practice” which’s shitty for her queer-lady following and by that I mean ME.

Franky’s episode was probs the season’s best, although it was totally fucked and if I’d seen it as a teenager and if high-speed internet had existed when I was a teenager, I would’ve watched it ten times and had lots of confusing and ultimately self-destructive sexual feelings about it. But a part of me knows that’s not a good thing, and presenting all that physical violence between Franky and Luke without context — like when he aggressively fucked her while twisting and smashing her head into the bed with his hand completely covering her face — seemed sloppy and felt like shock for the sake of shock rather than a genuine desire to tell that particular story. Like the story about the girl named Franky from last season’s finale. .