'Skins': The young and the reckless

Chris Collins (Jesse Carere) wakes up to discover that he's got an erection that won't go away; he had taken some sort of erectile aid the night before, but the potency is long-lasting. He also learns that his mother has left him $1,000, then disappeared. Where? Who knows? He throws a rave, trashes the house, spends every last dime and is eventually locked out by someone who's crashed in his shower.

MY SAY MTV made a terrible blunder with tonight's "Skins" and may have fatally wounded the entire series. Why? Reasonable question. Vulgarity, after all, is common on TV now; we have threesomes on "Gossip Girl," a masturbation scene on "Glee," endlessly imaginative erectile jokes on "Two and Half Men," and whatever else the alcohol-aided libido might concoct on "Jersey Shore." To varying degrees, these shows are designed for teens, and watched by teens.

But the issue here is that the scenes are acted by a child. Carere is 17, or was when this was filmed. Several scenes show his erection under skivvies, plus his naked behind walking down a street - and as such have raised the possibility that MTV is engaged in child pornography. In a recent front-page story, The New York Times even reported that some executives were worried they could do jail time.

In fact, the scenes aren't necessarily prurient - they are supposed to be tragicomic - but the controversy over them does speak to the larger problem with the U.S. reboot. This series so badly wants to say something important about the teen experience that it's become entangled in cliches about the teen experience. There are so many false notes that there's no particular reason to trust the larger messages it wants to convey - about intimacy, drug abuse or life passages.

BOTTOM LINE "Skins" isn't pornography; it's just second-rate TV.

GRADE C-