I did see this legally on streaming and was pissed as hell the soundtrack was modified. After Daria was badly affected by the lack of licensed music (I had to concede it wasn’t that bad but my discs skipped a lot and I got sick of watching it recently so I gave up), I’ve been annoyed any time a favourite scene has been regurgitated onto streaming without the song that made it my favourite scene. This is a show with an already banger soundtrack, much like Daria, you don’t fuck with perfection, unless you put clauses in your airing contracts to only ever use licensed songs in the original broadcast and never again. Streaming has really fucked with these things.
But being a Degrassi fan, I figured I’d like Skins but I cannot even remember what prompted me to watch it in the first place, I might’ve been bored enough, it was probably around the time I was living without a streaming service and trying to find whatever I could to entertain myself like Queer as Folk. Skins has a lot more humour since it was a UK show, it was better written than Degrassi, it walked so Euphoria could run, and I’ve heard too much bad about Euphoria to give it a chance now, so no. Also, I can’t stand Sydney Sweeney and she’s overrated as fuck. (I also realised I can’t watch Gilmore Girls and tolerate Melissa McCarthy at the same time). I think My Mad Fat Diary was also pretty close to matching Skins for humour and drama being well blended but I prefer Skins.
I’m aware a lot of people find shows insisting on raw (and I do mean raw) depictions of teens are offputting but I think for the most part they weren’t as pointlessly gratuitous as 13 Reasons Why. Tell a lie, it all gets a bit OTT by end of season 2.
I guess I can go over the characters, who are really well rounded and believable with understandable flaws. Michelle’s kind of stuck out to me halfway through season 2, I always get bummed out by love triangle/amnesiac storylines, but Michelle’s desperation to get Tony back and up after he’s had a traumatic brain injury is very teenage and unreasonable. You get she’s heartbroken after Tony admitted he loved her before being smacked by a bus, and it’s a very soap opera trope that’s actually handled convincingly, but she’s really unfair and impatient with Tony. Up until now, he’s been a dick on multiple levels, she’s been through the wringer, she’s a victim of his egotism, but at that point Tone’s been… hit by a fucking bus, has a sketchy memory and nerve damage so he’s lost his mojo. I do like Shell overall but she’s very snotty by the time they go on the camping trip she insists upon. She also sleeps with Sid, Tony’s other victim of manipulation, Sid being madly in love with Michelle until he finally realises Cassie’s the one. And he fucks shit up with her too. Michelle and Sid aren’t meant to be, and Tony realises this despite messing with their emotions and convincing Sid he should go after Michelle after he cheats on her with a snobby girl whose weird affectations I’m so obsessed with I imitate her all the time, Abigail. I liked Michelle with Abigail’s brother, Josh, who is technically mentally unhinged and makes Tony into a saint later, but it’s a bummer. She and Sid have a collective trauma from Tony’s accident, Sid’s compounded by losing his dad and Cassie with his dumb assumptions. So when she sleeps with Sid finally it makes total sense. I wouldn’t call her a chav, she’s really cool and pretty without being a total stuck up cow, her concerns are complex but still excusably teenage. Her mother’s the selfish type who victimises themselves after multiple divorces but they still have a good bond and can actually express care for one another. So Michelle is okay, but Cassie is so much prettier and got stuck comparing herself to Michelle.
Sid’s a lot of fun and absolutely adorable but stupid as fuck, he’s more depth than Anwa in terms of horny virgin boy (Anwa does get a girl pretty quickly while Sid goes without for a while). He suffers from Tony’s manipulations as well, Tony being a bored egotist and overachiever of upper-middle class parents, so he stirs the pot with his friends and throws emotional grenades and takes Sid for granted even if they’re childhood friends. Sid’s been in love with Michelle forever but tolerates her being Tony’s girlfriend while watching her be treated like crap, but he can’t exactly treat her better. Meanwhile, poor Cassie (who’s manic pixie dream girl coded but subtle and toned down, she’s more fairylike) falls in love with him, though he a) doesn’t care because Michelle and b) remains oblivious to Cassie’s obvious hints. He doesn’t deserve her, she’s emotionally unstable and he’s emotionally immature, so he can’t handle the misunderstanding (cliched as it is) that she’s not fucking two gay Scotts she’s living with. Sid’s insecurity fucks him over but you do feel sorry for him, his dad (the angry Doctor) takes out his insecurity on Sid, his mum (who was in an episode of British Whose Line I’ve watched to death) eventually takes off and only returns after the dad dies. Sid remains an underachiever but he’s still loveable and him standing up to Tony is great, but he’s always compromised by his mates, so he’s loyal to a fault and it really fucks Cassie over. Justice for Cassie. The fact NOBODY is okay with him and Michelle speaks volumes. I do love Sid but he’s a twat. And he accuses Cassie of not being there for him when his dad died but she literally came back to see him and didn’t actually fucking cheat, and couldn’t use a computer to prove she wasn’t screwing the Scotts. So she didn’t do anything, it was a misunderstanding, and she doesn’t apologise for anything really, she didn’t fuck a kid. She was cheated on and he bitches about having to apologise. Shut up, Sid. Now I dislike you.
You could hate Anwa a lot for how “extra” he is, but this is Dev Patel pre-glowup and he’s good value. He doesn’t do a lot of shitty crap aside from reject Maxxie, his gay best buddy, for being gay since he’s Muslim. Until we discover his dad’s an absolute legend and doesn’t even care about Maxxie or gays, and he just said, shit is fucked, my God’ll sort it out in the wash so it’s all fine. It’s adorable. Anwa’s dad is a champ. Anwa’s sadly been misguided about his own religion, it’s kind of sad he didn’t know his own dad was more accepting. And he is a hypocrite, praying five times a day doesn’t make him less of a scoundrel kid. But he’s silly and loveable and a drum n’ bass poser who’s easily led around by his cock. I do like him, I get why he sleeps with Sketch, Maxxie’s stalker, he can’t help himself and falls for her antics. He makes me laugh, he would’ve made me laugh as a teen. He’s mum’s a doll as well, she’s more forgiving of his bad grades. He and Sketch kinda just wind up in the same place and he freaks out knowing she’s all he’s got left. None of his mates can party with him, they’re already leaving.
I should move onto Maxxie, the openly gay dancer whose dad is Bill Bailey and dances with a dog, it’s fucking cute. I love Maxxie to bits, he gets bullied by the homophobes in his council flat, one of them a closeted gay who jumps him in the woods. He’s highly confident and talented and knows it. He’s got a lot going for him but he kind of fades into the background after Sketch is revealed as his stalker. I think they could’ve done so much more with him. He even gets screwed by Tony’s brief brush with bisexuality, and it sucks he gets thrown under the bus for going along with it in front of Michelle, unbeknownst to him. You can kind of tell when channels and networks don’t commit to gay characters because of complaints or lower ratings, so he’s mostly tokenised by then. Justice for Maxxie. He and Anwa are the closest, but he has a history with Tony and takes care of him after the accident, so he’s forgiving, unless it’s Sketch and Anwa for sleeping together. But he loves his friends dearly and we love him. He’s also obscenely spunky. I’ve a soft spot for him. He and Anwa make up after Sketch turns Anwa into his clone, I can’t believe I forgot that, she gets “dahumped” and the boys are back on. I won’t say anything separate about Sketch, she’s caring for her disabled mother so she’s pathetic but they still villainise her as well because of her obsession. She’s just stuck to Maxxie from her fixations she doesn’t really have much to do on her own other than poison Michelle to take her place in the musical and frame the sketchy drama teacher with molestation. Maxxie does get a boyfriend at the end called James but they don’t do anything physical. James shows up at the funeral, now he’s one of the gang, but he feels awkward about it. Poor Maxxie really is relegated in season after Sketch.
Chris is a complete bellend on the surface but he’s probably the best of the guys. He’s basically drug addled and abandoned by his mother early on, his dad also refusing to acknowledge him. He’s lost an older brother, we find out later it’s due to a neurological condition, so Chris’s ending is so tragic for how positive he is the face of persistent adversity from his own fuck ups. He’s his own worst enemy but you root for him anyway. But when he does get his shit together, his psychology teacher Angie comes back to take advantage. She sleeps with him in the first season, really mucks him around, and they make her look like a right hag by the time she comes back to take advantage. By then, he’s hooked up with Jal, Michelle’s bestie who also gets trodden on by Michelle’s obsession with Tony. He and Jal are perfect and Angie manages to ruin it, by way of Cassie being interfering and weird (I will get to her, I’m so mad at her character assassination after she leaves Sid). He does move in with Cass later, winds up a pothead and finally dies tragically, unaware Jal’s pregnant with his baby. Chris could’ve been a character in Trainspotting for how he fucks anything good up with his own compulsive shit. But he’s too loveable to hate. Tony does care about him more than you would expect, Chris’s mum leaving is grossly unfair, he’s not in a secure place as a kid and is destined to be a screwball adult. It’s not entirely his fault. Angie at least leaves him with her flat and he tries to patch shit up with Jal, who he’s taught to “live a little” in exchange for “trying harder”. He can at least rationalise why he’s a fuckup and he pulls it together even if it’s to sell drugs with Cass, they have a nice place. The set up of his brother’s death leaves no hint of it being hereditary, him being sick still comes as a shock, he’s more tragic for being abandoned by his family and he goes on living even though he knows there’s a chance he’ll suffer the same fate. Jal tells him she’s pregnant while he’s conked out and he’s afraid she’ll leave if he’s sick, she does eventually tell him the truth, I thought she didn’t. His mum comes back knowing he’s going to get worse so it’s more obvious she ran out of fear of losing him too. We end up meeting the dad at the very end when he tells Sid he doesn’t want the mates there. We’ve only heard his voice before, he’s more slimy and judgemental and accuses all his friends of ruining Chris’s life. So Tony steals the coffin and Britney’s playing and it’s brilliant, and they fuck it up on the stream. The dad has to suffer through false platitudes and losing the coffin, and fireworks the kids let off whilst standing on the hill above watching Chris’s funeral.
I want to discuss Cassie before I get to Jal. We don’t see Cassie as a destructive force initially, she’s basically Cassandra from the Greek mythology (we get a Pandora who I do love but not enough to see her with Effy in season 3). From the start she’s fresh out of the psych ward from an eating disorder and (I think) pill addiction. Her oblivious hippy, wino parents ignore her and her issues, she takes care of the baby they’ve birthed for no good reason. (Her dad’s also from Men Behaving Badly, I shouldn’t love that show as much as I do). She’s lonely and latches onto Sid, she’s not besties with Michelle, she’s also self-destructive and vulnerable and Sid doesn’t care as much as he claims to. Her ED’s not really a focus later on, she’s a drifter and acting more and more unhinged, though she brings up the power not eating had over others. Once she knows about Sid and Michelle, who wouldn’t have done it had Sid not been a tool, she spirals and basically ends up homeless with nobody. So she’s so fucking mad at everyone but she get so villainous and I hate it. She hooks up with girls and guys and gets Chris in trouble. I hate it when she’s not a bad character, it means she’s less “manic” and more evil which sucks. She eventually disappears to America after finding Chris dead and Sid chases after her at last. We don’t know if they find one another, the show ends there. Also, I don’t know how she funds this shit, she’s dropped out of school and doesn’t have work, she sells drugs when she’s living with Chris. She can’t get a fucking break and it shits me since she’s my favourite and I love her. She’s kind of part of the group but not, and kind of everyone’s supplier. Cassie did nothing fucking wrong. Sid doesn’t deserve her. She proposes dating Tony to get back at Sid and Michelle. He’s much nicer to her after the accident. But Cassie basically whores herself out and makes rent from selling drugs and still seems to have more agency on her own. She’s probably too mean to Jal when they go on their weird little adventure and she gets even more cryptic about Chris. To be fair, Cass is actually there for Jal when Michelle ditches her again for Tony simping after all that time. And Michelle comes through in the end but still has to chase Jal and deal with Cassie as well, Cass isn’t all that forgiving either. Oh, god I forgot about the bitchy principal blasting Funky Town during Cassie’s makeup exam. I’ve had to do a deferred exam and nobody let me dance. And I still pulled it off after an actual nervous breakdown, people were legit mad I actually did well. Cassie’s then forced to sit through dinner with the enemies. Sid’s needlessly vicious to Cass, expecting her to be okay with it is a bit much. They do kinda bash her up like that one sick friend who they all get sick of dealing with. Cass and Shell have very similar noses actually, she’s reasonably pissed Michelle and Tony might not even make it through college. She doesn’t want people to leave her but she can’t deal with Chris going and has to run. I don’t really like she’s so often left alone, she and Chris make good pals for how silly they both are, I don’t know if they were hinting at some flirtation, seriously when they are together they’re much better suited. She can’t even face him and Cassie has to deal with Chris losing a chance to see his mum again. She’s forced to see a lot and nobody supports her through it. She’s probably the most the traumatised overall, everyone else kinda moves on from their worst moments. She fucking has to watch Chris die and everyone treats her like a pain in the bum. It’s horrifying and there’s nothing she can do, people persistently bail on her and she leaves the country. She runs into a guy called Adam and lives with him haphazardly and learns not everything has to be transactional but the bad shit won’t end. I don’t get why she runs to America specifically. I know they made the US version, maybe this episode was a backdoor pilot, by the looks it’s not but it could’ve been during negotiations to make the US version. Adam leaves her too and lets her live in his place as compensation for fucking abandoning her too. He leaves her with an apple and a fresh start if she can get her shit together.
I’m going to leave Tony until last, so I’d rather mention Jalanada. Jal’s the token black of the show but they do well to avoid that aspect since she’s from a rich family with her music producer/artist dad. Her mum’s taken off, and the school treats her musical accomplishments as their achievement because nobody knows she’s not an impoverished black girl. The music thing falls by the wayside while she puts up with Michelle and Tony’s drama, even though she knows about Abigail and doesn’t make it clear enough to Michelle, she picks up the pieces after Tony mid 2000s manages to send naked pictures of Abigail from Josh’s phone so Michelle thinks Josh is a psycho. Jal’s a much better friend than anyone deserves, she looks after everyone like the sister/mother hen type. She gets her clarinet smashed up by drug dealers who Sid fucks over. But she’s forgiving too and she forgives Chris. They are a good couple and Jal deserves better, she’s ignored by her dad for her dropkick brothers who have no talent, and her mother leaves the family, she’s not square with her dad who says she plays “rootie tootie” music. I appreciate they made a point of her being affluent but still horribly lost. I know she goes to a major music school audition after losing another contest earlier on, we see her with the clarinet in that godawful 9/11 musical. She struggles to be the hot one but when she breaks out of her shell everyone adores her. Jal’s great and a better person than Michelle, and Michelle still makes everything about her while Jal’s pregnant and stuck with bigger bloody problems. Jal didn’t deserve anything she got, she’s the best to her friends and they don’t give her much back until after Chris dies. Her dad trashes her for being pregnant, I think her mum comes home but at least her bros are sweet to her in the end. She’s carried a lot as the only girl who’s got too much expectation on her compared to her siblings. She goes spare when Chris is wheeled away, it’s sad they have the best relationship only for Chris to die. I think she ends up terminating the kid. She and Michelle bond the most at the end, Michelle’s technically in a better place and Jal confesses to the abortion and Michelle takes Jal to where she met Chris. Michelle’s a good egg when the chips are down, Jal’s able to let go and really say fuck it in memory of Chris.
I’ll put in a bit about Effy from what we get of her. She’s actually a big part of the story as Tony’s much cooler, far more delinquent little sister, the pair of them simpatico in driving their dad mad and implicit in each other’s misbehaviour. Tony is protective of her to a massive degree when Josh manages to use her in a scheme for revenge on Tony incriminating him against Michelle, who he really liked and was genuinely kind to but then he also gets villainised once he demands Tony have sex with Effy while she’s passed out on his mum’s clean pharmaceuticals. Effy isn’t even aware Josh is using her, she’s just gone out for a night with a stupid friend and it’s like most of her usual nights out. She’s along for the ride and willingly gets injected but winds up a pawn. Tony’s traumatised by the ordeal and we get to see how terrified he can be. Effy winds up reading him stories, she witnesses him getting pancaked and has the biggest reaction we’ve seen from her. She reads Orpheus and Eurydice to him, this is when the Greek mythology gets deeper. Effy’s then planted as the new Tony and our major character, then she becomes the new fan favourite. I love her maturity, she makes Michelle and Sid look like tossers when they show up to check on Tony. She protects him as he did her, they don’t get in fights, but someone else asks if he wants to fuck his sister so whether they were hamming up a weird intimacy between them, I’m not sure. Effy rules. I kinda like to leave her at the very end of season 2 when she’s eyeing the camera from Tony’s bed, bookending the shot of Tony we got at the start. Effy fixes shit, she gets shit done, she’s more mature than all the others, she’s too cool for everything. I prefer seeing her less of a mess than she is later on. She practically picks up the fucking pieces of all their shambles, including her own parents. She parentifies everyone it’s insane. I like she gets her own episode at her all-girls school where she’s dumped after her night with Josh. Then she has to babysit Pandora, and she tells her outright she doesn’t have friends. I think that’s actually why I love Effy a lot. I think maybe the weird friend she went out with who talked too much was going to be Pandora, can’t verify it though. Effy just treats people’s soap operas as beneath her since she’s too smart to fall into this crap herself. Even though she shuns the notion of caring about others and for once Tony calls her on her BS.
So we get to Tony Stonem, our “hero”. Nicholas Hoult is a treasure though I hated him as JD Salinger, I do love he made friends with the Kombucha Girl and they did an interview on YouTube which thrilled me a lot. You think he’s the real villain for how he uses powerplays on his best friend and girlfriend, but ultimately we learn he weirdly loves them as this mismanaged throuple and he has to win back Michelle while convincing Sid he doesn’t love Michelle at all. He’s rarely humiliated or even made to look slightly like a fool, so Michelle having enough of his shit momentarily is a shock. He loses his friends over the Josh stunt so he’s not rewarded for his bollocks, then he comes to his senses, gets pancaked and loses them again. You hate Abigail for manipulating him despite him using her against Josh and Michelle. I don’t have a paragraph for Abigail I just love the way she says “fronds” in her posh voice, she’s hammy otherwise and too soapy as a pesky foil to Tony and Michelle. He’s still enough of a dick people don’t help him until Effy’s in trouble. I don’t like the girl he meets at the college, he’s still going through his Underworld journey to get back to himself, he’s frustrated by his temporary disability and ends up in embarrassing situations but the little girls all love him too much to laugh at him being “mental”. Him being impotent doesn’t fuck with him as much as it does Michelle, he isn’t that angry until that mystery girl helps him get his mojo back, he still slips into “old Tony” and calls Michelle nips which she can’t stand, it’s more out of spite by then for going with Sid. They’re his family but they don’t see it for him being so manipulative. They love Tony but he has to learn to love them back. This was such a huge role to take and pull off as sympathetically as Hoult does, he’s memorable in the way you don’t want to remember James Van Der Beek as Dawson. He’s a cheeky boy who grows up eventually, his parents still think he’s a selfish twit and don’t cope with his accident, he puts more into recovering himself and what he lost than anyone around him. It’s sad Michelle and Sid kind of abandon him so they have to look like twats by then. Sid fails to stand up for Michelle to Tony, he comes back and puts it right, and Cassie gets to benefit from Sid being knocked in the head. He’s right about everything. Sid’s not enough for Michelle and he doesn’t love her the way she needs. And he gives Cassie a hug which she deserved more than Sid. Tony does get what he wants eventually and has some humility still, you don’t believe he can be moved by anything until he loses everything. But he fights to get it all back again and you want to see him get it. He’s fragile still but more optimistic.
They all gather to read their results and realise they’re about to be separated anyway. Michelle and Tony have to face splitting. Anwa has his results already but we don’t know until Maxxie reads them and he goes home to Sketch defeated. Sketch is just desperate to have a date with him and keep him. Jal goes to Chris’s grave and his dad speaks to her at last, admitting he was a shit dad. The guy who plays the dad’s been in a few things as a nervy type. Jal’s basically standing with the grandad of her aborted baby. Anwa goes to see Maxxie off, he’s not even really been in this season comparatively, Maxxie convinces Anwa to go with them, Sketch left behind. I don’t think the show wanted to give her anything good for how antagonistic she is. Cassie’s trying to get by in the US as a waitress, I don’t even know what her status is, technically she could be deported but she’s white so that’ll never happen. Sid, Michelle and Tony have to tie their crap up while they drive Sid to the airport to find Cassie. Time to Pretend by MGMT plays, it’s memorable and they fuck it up in the stream. I had to plug a decrepit external drive into an outdated Macbook Pro just to fish these files off it then onto a USB stick because the external drive was too old for the Linux system I run off the TV, just to see that scene as it was. Tony and Sid finally have a good moment. It’s got the feel of a proper final episode where the actors are really saying goodbye. You can have a short a sweet series with more impact than something lengthy. Tony realises he’s losing his mates and his girl anyway despite all the drama. He’s not ready for it to end. It’s stupid how people think you should feel before ending school, it’s not the same. Tony and Michelle admit they had a good thing but it won’t last. Sid gets treated like a vagrant looking for Cassie, and we get Effy in all her potential glory.
The show’s properly encapsulated in these two seasons. There doesn’t need to be more. I kinda hate there is. I love all the parents, they have more influence than some Degrassi parents, they’re flawed and willing to compromise with their kids, though I do hate Tony’s dad a lot. He’s a twat and I hate his mum can’t cope without him and takes Tony’s pills when the dad’s so detached from the reality of his family’s troubles. They could’ve made all the families the same income bracket, there’s enough deviation from the norm while still staying in a believable lane. Also their “next on” trailers were really well edited and clever. The theme is great, the vibes are great, the mid 2000s was a great period for shows that genuinely didn’t age that badly. I always try to do character bios so the plot jumps all over the place. But this is as good if not better than I remember, I still think Cass gets way too much shit for how she reacts to shit like she’s supposed to roll over and live with it. Tony and Michelle eclipse a lot of the other characters because romantic leads so often do, the ensemble gets watered down, but Chris and Jal make a big part of the ending. Because Maxxie and Anwa could only have race/sexuality issues once you deal with it, you have to find something else or give them nothing. Maxxie having a female stalker was interesting but we don’t see anything of his dancing or trying to make it into a dance school the way we see with Jal and her music college. There’s only 19 episodes, we get what we get and it’s good. And I like finishing there, I don’t need more.
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