Sunday 30 November 2014
Wednesday 26 November 2014
Thursday 20 November 2014
Sunday 19 October 2014
TEEN AUDIENCE - PRIMARY RESEARCH
All groups and individual students must carry out primary audience research. Please design and complete a questionnaire asking key questions, to help you plan an appeal and attractive production.
TEEN AUDIENCE SECONDARY RESEARCH
The Purpose of this post are the following:
Teens are early adopters of technology and account for 20% of the mobile video market.
What production decisions have you made to satisfy the needs of your early adopters teen audiences?
Please read through the slideshare document below. All tasks are written in either blue or green
- To ensure that provide the examiner with evidence of having used secondary audience research (i.e. findings gathered by others) to help you plan your production.
- To help you make good choices when thinking about appealing to and meeting the needs and interest of your target audience.
There is no expectation that you will use all of the resources and tasks made available however, completing several of them well, will certainly help contribute to scoring those higher marks.
- Teens Are Early Adopters
Teens are early adopters of technology and account for 20% of the mobile video market.
What defines an Early Adopter?
Risk takers – the desire for novelty, to be first with the newest versus the safety of choosing products based on market history.
Information Gatherers – Early adopters are more likely to do the actual research required to make an adoption decision. They mitigate risk through information gathering. They are respected for their opinions.
Status Seekers – They strive to feel unique by always knowing what’s best. Products are chosen as vehicles of self expression and reflections of status.
- Social Media Examiner
- McQuails Users & Gratification Theory
Read through the content below on how to attract the attention and appeal to teens. Come up with a list of do's and don'ts.
Some businesses might have an advantage if their services or products appeal to teenagers. Teens have disposable income and they like to spend it. If you can grab this demographic, you may find intensely loyal, enthusiastic customers.
Tapping into the teen market can be a way to jump-start your business. But make sure you learn how to speak to this audience. While teens are quick to let peers know what is new and cutting-edge, this same group can just as easily tell everyone they know that a product just doesn’t cut it. Make sure you, your product, and your message are as authentic as can be.
Grabbing Their Attention
Today's teens are multitaskers, which means you have to try harder to get them to pay attention to your message. Your message has to grab their attention quickly and effectively. Teens love technology, and they are early adopters. So use it to your advantage. Offer them something they really want, like a free music or video download that will entice them to look at your ad and want to know more. If you’re targeting tweens (short for the age group “in between” childhood and teens), think about offering a game they can play that will get them hooked and coming back to your site again and again.
Using Social Networking
Don’t overlook the power of social networking sites in your marketing plan. Make a place for your business on MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Teens frequent these sites, and if you can gain their attention, you can create some serious buzz for your business. If you continually add content to your site, they’ll come back repeatedly. Facebook has an advertising plan that targetsusers by subject matter they post on their profiles, so check it out to see where your business fits into the advertising equation.
In addition, both MySpace and Facebook let users become fans of advertisers, so if you advertise on these social networks and your product is desirable, you'll get a group of fans that you can use to target your marketing efforts. Ask them what they like about your products and why they’re fans, and you’ll get invaluable marketing information. Ask them to fill out a survey about your marketing efforts and offer a desirable prize, and you'll get even more information you can use to market to teens.
Making It Funny
Teens are savvy about online advertising; they won’t click on a banner just because it’s there. If you can make your advertising funny and amusing, it will generate buzz and produce more hits to your ads as teens pass them along to their friends. Teens don’t like spam and pop-ups any more than the rest of the online community, so avoid these types of ads in your teen marketingcampaign.
Avoiding E-mail
- Teen Audiences & Use of Social Media
Please read through the slideshare document below. All tasks are written in either blue or green
Teen Audience Research Extension Task from Graveney School
Reading the content of the article below and take brief notes on why British teens prefer British teen shows. Now create a spidergram showing why your ideas for your show is more British than it is American
Thursday, 16 November 2006
- British Teen Shows
Reading the content of the article below and take brief notes on why British teens prefer British teen shows. Now create a spidergram showing why your ideas for your show is more British than it is American
The article below provides good insight into why Skins is so popular among teen audiences. After reading the article and taking a few but important notes, what tips can you incorporate into your own production?
Teen dramas: Down with the kids
Most teen dramas are a far cry from the real-life issues facing adolescents. But 'Skins' promises to tell it like it is. Liz Hoggard meets the team behind it
'Seventeen-year-olds have deep and complex lives. They have just as much right to a complicated structure to their emotions as Dame Judi Dench does," says writer/producer Bryan Elsley. "But so often you don't see that represented in TV drama."
I'm sitting in on a script workshop for Skins, the new nine-part comedy drama that will go out on E4 early next year. Focusing on the lives of a group of 16- to 17-year-old friends, it's made by Company Pictures (who brought us Shameless), so you can expect a realistic portrayal of drinking, socialising and shagging. But the drama also aims to portray the complex emotions of people on the brink of adulthood.
How many great teen TV dramas have there been in the last 10 years? The OC, Buffy, Sugar Rush? The majority are full of impossibly pretty people leading impossibly perfect lives. It's not surprising you hear teenagers complain "There's nothing on TV for me!". The MySpace generation is more likely to spend time online or watching DVDs.
But hopefully Skins will do for teenagers what This Life did for twentysomethings. "I hope it will feel as authentic because it's genuinely inspired by, driven by, and directed by young people," says the head of E4, Danny Cohen.
Many teen dramas fail because they're written by jaded fortysomethings. But Company Pictures has brought in a youthful team of contributors. In the room with me are stand-ups Simon Amstell (Popworld) and Josie Long (awarded best newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer), the Dawson Brothers (Balls of Steel, Dirty Tricks), and Jack Thorne, whose play When You Cure Me was performed at the Bush last year, and who has also written for Shameless. Three real-life teenagers are on hand to make sure the dialogue is spot on and, overseeing it all is Elsley (The Young Person's Guide to Becoming a Rock Star, 40, The Crow Road).
Everyone is keen to avoid the clichés of teen programming. This will not be a show full of beautiful people firing off smart one-liners. Rather, the writers want to convey the raw emotion of teen life, the sense of making it up as you go along. "Teenagers aren't especially articulate," says Jack Thorne, "so a lot of the humour is physical." "What differentiates our show from Hollyoaks is that there is a subtext," says Elsley, "and the camera action is where you communicate that subtext."
The writers have established Dogma-style rules for Skins; no flashbacks, no fantasy sequences, no funny camera moves. "No pumping soundtracks," adds Amstell. And unusually for a teen drama, cinematography is crucial. "The problem with Dawson's Creek is that they talk out all their issues and everything gets solved. But what we're trying to do is address these problems televisually," says Elsley, "without talking everything out all the time." "Don't diss The Creek," says Thorne, a glint in his eye.
Skins follows the lives of nine teenagers from the same Bristol sixth-form college. Each hour-long episode is devoted to a different character. All the cinematic tropes of high school are here: pretty boys and girls, geeks, sidekicks and outcasts.
Apart from Nicholas Hoult as Tony (About a Boy, Wah-Wah), the cast is largely made up of first-time actors. But there's a great running joke: all the adults are played by well-known actors and comedians. Tom's parents are Harry Enfield and Morwenna Banks; Neil Morrissey is the father of the eccentric Cassie; while pretty girl Michelle is at loggerheads with her mum (Arabella Weir) and much younger stepdad (played by Danny Dyer).
But E4 is actually playing down the celebrity angle. It believes 17-year-old viewers will be more interested in seeing their own age group reflected on screen (arguably it is thirtysomething Fast Show fans who will relish Enfield playing a porky, middle-aged dad), plus the drama is filmed from a teen perspective. The adults only appear on the periphery of their children's lives - which feels pretty true to life. "It's like the old Tom & Jerry cartoon where you only ever see their legs," says C4's senior commissioning editor for drama, Francis Hopkinson.
Elsley came up with the idea for Skins when his son, Jamie Brittain (now 20 and one of the writing team) complained there was nothing worth watching on TV.
In fact, Hopkinson and Cohen were actively looking to grow their own drama for E4. They'd already tried out a few sci-fi shows with a young cast, but could never find the right scripts. So when Elsley approached them, they jumped at the concept.
A lot of teen TV is "alienated, disembodied wallpaper", argues Elsley. "What producers tend to do is smooth everything out so it's not controversial. Everyone's very beautiful, everyone looks the same. They shoot it all on a hand-held camera because no one can afford to stand still and think about these things."
Skins is not intended to be socially useful, however. Primarily it's entertainment, though the writers manage to sneak a few issues under the wire. Everyone is pretty cool about race and sexuality. There's a very funny scene where Maxxie, the openly gay character, takes the boys along for A Big Gay Night Out, only for it to end in a dismal karaoke session in a pub.
And in episode two Cassie clearly has an eating disorder, although no one mentions anorexia explicitly. "It's just all about how she gets through her day without eating," says Elsley. "So the episode is about how she feels and what her tactics are." In fact the writers fought not to have a helpline at the end of the episode. "We don't want a little preachy drama where everyone hugs at the end," says Thorne, "but hopefully some people will recognise themselves in Cassie."
"We're not attempting to help or instruct anyone," says Elsley. "What we're trying to do is write a show about relationships. It's not about whether or not you should have sex, or whether or not you should take drugs."
Similarly they turned down all offers of commercial sponsorship ("kids see through it", says Hopkinson) and any sort of whacky title like "Crazy Days". Skins works, says Cohen, because it has a myriad of meanings. The episode they're brainstorming today focuses on Michelle, the empty pretty girl we all remember from school. But Michelle is about to get a shock: when she splits from Tony her world comes tumbling down. The writers debate how her new-found insecurity can be represented in a fresh way. "You could have her trying on hundreds of different outfits," suggests Josie Long.
Refreshingly, they turn down the opportunity to have Michelle embark on an affair with her stepdad, or introduce a predictable abuse storyline. "Too Brookside," says Amstell.
"The problem with teen dram is it tends to be either quite working-class or quite glib," says Thorne. "The thing about the Skins lot is they are from comprehensive schools but they're not especially gritty. They live in a world we all grew up in. It's not just about crime and stealing, it's about working out how to have fun."
For all the moral relativism, there is a heart to Skins. Everyone involved on the production feels passionately that 17 is a tricky rite of passage.
The beautiful, callous Tony may initially seem the hero, but in fact audiences are most likely to identify with geeky Sid.
And Skins is often very funny. Not only do we get to snigger at trendy parents fighting for the Coldplay album, the teens are convincingly narcissistic. "I recently re-read all my old diaries and, God, are they bleak!" laughs Long. "They're a combination of intensely emotional and really superficial. Things like, 'Everyone looked lovely. I wish I were dead'."
"Growing up it took me years to work out that actually I wasn't popular at all; I was just with the popular people," laughs Thorne.
There is a rawness to Skins because the characters are doing everything for the first time - from sex to posh parties. "By the time you reach your thirties you've fallen in and out of love two or three times, so you understand the rhythms, but the first time when you go through it, you never really understand it," says Hopkinson. "And of course you have more time to brood over things, and plan things, which you don't have if you have a 9-5 job, or are married or have children."
Production values on Skins are impressively high. According to Hopkinson (whose credits include Longford, Elizabeth I and a dramatisation of the Bradford riots), the model is independent films such as Mean Girls and Brick. He doesn't see why shows that feature teenagers, such as Sugar Rush, should be automatically labelled as teen drama. "You watch something like Stand by Me and you don't say, 'that's a children's drama' just because it's got children in. It's an adult drama, but you watch it because it takes you into a different world, and that's what I want Skins to do."
Elsley boasts that they have one of the youngest TV writing teams ever (the average age is 23, and they'd like to get it under 20 for series two). But he's upfront about the budgetary constraints. After today's brainstorming session, he has the headache of writing the Michelle episode. "I've volunteered to Channel 4 for this to be the cheap episode," he laughs, "so that means the absolute minimum number of supporting artists and locations."
Since the Skins team snapped her up, stand-up Josie Long's career has gone through the roof. But she says she's learnt a huge amount. "I'd never written drama before and suddenly it was 'wow you're making a glamorous TV show!'. The attraction for me was being able to meet other young writers in a workshopy way. I really love American comedy and I got very excited by the idea of team writing. As a stand-up you don't ever volunteer for criticism; you just go 'well this is what I think is funny'. It's your only way of having consistency, you need to have your own belief in it. But with scriptwriting you do draft after draft, and there's so much input and advice. You have to be a lot more open."
Skins will go out post-watershed: the characters drop pills, have sex, and push boundaries like only teenagers can. Writing authentic dialogue wasn't always easy, however. The Broadcasting Standards Codes rule against the use of certain words (which are the words that 16-year-olds use). Plus the writers also have to work within the constraints of the Child Protection Act. "It's a huge issue for us in terms of what we can depict," says Elsley. "We want to show life as it happens, but the Child Protection Act regulates against the depiction of teenage life as it actually happens."
Four months after the workshop, I watch a rough cut of the drama. The first episode - where Sid tries to lose his virginity - may seem slightly laddy. But hang in there for episode two (Cassie's story), which is a fantastically nuanced piece of writing. When it comes to the mysteries of puberty, Skins aims to communicate with teen audiences, while also reminding adults what it was really like. Yes they have more sex and better haircuts these days, but it does a great job of conveying the gaucherie of adolescence - the agony of teen politics.
"It's got lots of texture to it," says Long. "It doesn't just feel, 'Oh look, we're zeitgeisty and young'."
E4 insists there is no one target audience for Skins. It is billed as drama "for young people of all ages". "I don't just want to make it a drama that 16-year-olds feel they will watch," says Hopkinson. "Good stories are universal. I mean My mother watched This Life."
'Skins' is on E4 in the new year
How many great teen TV dramas have there been in the last 10 years? The OC, Buffy, Sugar Rush? The majority are full of impossibly pretty people leading impossibly perfect lives. It's not surprising you hear teenagers complain "There's nothing on TV for me!". The MySpace generation is more likely to spend time online or watching DVDs.
But hopefully Skins will do for teenagers what This Life did for twentysomethings. "I hope it will feel as authentic because it's genuinely inspired by, driven by, and directed by young people," says the head of E4, Danny Cohen.
Many teen dramas fail because they're written by jaded fortysomethings. But Company Pictures has brought in a youthful team of contributors. In the room with me are stand-ups Simon Amstell (Popworld) and Josie Long (awarded best newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer), the Dawson Brothers (Balls of Steel, Dirty Tricks), and Jack Thorne, whose play When You Cure Me was performed at the Bush last year, and who has also written for Shameless. Three real-life teenagers are on hand to make sure the dialogue is spot on and, overseeing it all is Elsley (The Young Person's Guide to Becoming a Rock Star, 40, The Crow Road).
Everyone is keen to avoid the clichés of teen programming. This will not be a show full of beautiful people firing off smart one-liners. Rather, the writers want to convey the raw emotion of teen life, the sense of making it up as you go along. "Teenagers aren't especially articulate," says Jack Thorne, "so a lot of the humour is physical." "What differentiates our show from Hollyoaks is that there is a subtext," says Elsley, "and the camera action is where you communicate that subtext."
The writers have established Dogma-style rules for Skins; no flashbacks, no fantasy sequences, no funny camera moves. "No pumping soundtracks," adds Amstell. And unusually for a teen drama, cinematography is crucial. "The problem with Dawson's Creek is that they talk out all their issues and everything gets solved. But what we're trying to do is address these problems televisually," says Elsley, "without talking everything out all the time." "Don't diss The Creek," says Thorne, a glint in his eye.
Skins follows the lives of nine teenagers from the same Bristol sixth-form college. Each hour-long episode is devoted to a different character. All the cinematic tropes of high school are here: pretty boys and girls, geeks, sidekicks and outcasts.
Apart from Nicholas Hoult as Tony (About a Boy, Wah-Wah), the cast is largely made up of first-time actors. But there's a great running joke: all the adults are played by well-known actors and comedians. Tom's parents are Harry Enfield and Morwenna Banks; Neil Morrissey is the father of the eccentric Cassie; while pretty girl Michelle is at loggerheads with her mum (Arabella Weir) and much younger stepdad (played by Danny Dyer).
But E4 is actually playing down the celebrity angle. It believes 17-year-old viewers will be more interested in seeing their own age group reflected on screen (arguably it is thirtysomething Fast Show fans who will relish Enfield playing a porky, middle-aged dad), plus the drama is filmed from a teen perspective. The adults only appear on the periphery of their children's lives - which feels pretty true to life. "It's like the old Tom & Jerry cartoon where you only ever see their legs," says C4's senior commissioning editor for drama, Francis Hopkinson.
Elsley came up with the idea for Skins when his son, Jamie Brittain (now 20 and one of the writing team) complained there was nothing worth watching on TV.
In fact, Hopkinson and Cohen were actively looking to grow their own drama for E4. They'd already tried out a few sci-fi shows with a young cast, but could never find the right scripts. So when Elsley approached them, they jumped at the concept.
A lot of teen TV is "alienated, disembodied wallpaper", argues Elsley. "What producers tend to do is smooth everything out so it's not controversial. Everyone's very beautiful, everyone looks the same. They shoot it all on a hand-held camera because no one can afford to stand still and think about these things."
Skins is not intended to be socially useful, however. Primarily it's entertainment, though the writers manage to sneak a few issues under the wire. Everyone is pretty cool about race and sexuality. There's a very funny scene where Maxxie, the openly gay character, takes the boys along for A Big Gay Night Out, only for it to end in a dismal karaoke session in a pub.
And in episode two Cassie clearly has an eating disorder, although no one mentions anorexia explicitly. "It's just all about how she gets through her day without eating," says Elsley. "So the episode is about how she feels and what her tactics are." In fact the writers fought not to have a helpline at the end of the episode. "We don't want a little preachy drama where everyone hugs at the end," says Thorne, "but hopefully some people will recognise themselves in Cassie."
"We're not attempting to help or instruct anyone," says Elsley. "What we're trying to do is write a show about relationships. It's not about whether or not you should have sex, or whether or not you should take drugs."
Similarly they turned down all offers of commercial sponsorship ("kids see through it", says Hopkinson) and any sort of whacky title like "Crazy Days". Skins works, says Cohen, because it has a myriad of meanings. The episode they're brainstorming today focuses on Michelle, the empty pretty girl we all remember from school. But Michelle is about to get a shock: when she splits from Tony her world comes tumbling down. The writers debate how her new-found insecurity can be represented in a fresh way. "You could have her trying on hundreds of different outfits," suggests Josie Long.
Refreshingly, they turn down the opportunity to have Michelle embark on an affair with her stepdad, or introduce a predictable abuse storyline. "Too Brookside," says Amstell.
"The problem with teen dram is it tends to be either quite working-class or quite glib," says Thorne. "The thing about the Skins lot is they are from comprehensive schools but they're not especially gritty. They live in a world we all grew up in. It's not just about crime and stealing, it's about working out how to have fun."
For all the moral relativism, there is a heart to Skins. Everyone involved on the production feels passionately that 17 is a tricky rite of passage.
The beautiful, callous Tony may initially seem the hero, but in fact audiences are most likely to identify with geeky Sid.
And Skins is often very funny. Not only do we get to snigger at trendy parents fighting for the Coldplay album, the teens are convincingly narcissistic. "I recently re-read all my old diaries and, God, are they bleak!" laughs Long. "They're a combination of intensely emotional and really superficial. Things like, 'Everyone looked lovely. I wish I were dead'."
"Growing up it took me years to work out that actually I wasn't popular at all; I was just with the popular people," laughs Thorne.
There is a rawness to Skins because the characters are doing everything for the first time - from sex to posh parties. "By the time you reach your thirties you've fallen in and out of love two or three times, so you understand the rhythms, but the first time when you go through it, you never really understand it," says Hopkinson. "And of course you have more time to brood over things, and plan things, which you don't have if you have a 9-5 job, or are married or have children."
Production values on Skins are impressively high. According to Hopkinson (whose credits include Longford, Elizabeth I and a dramatisation of the Bradford riots), the model is independent films such as Mean Girls and Brick. He doesn't see why shows that feature teenagers, such as Sugar Rush, should be automatically labelled as teen drama. "You watch something like Stand by Me and you don't say, 'that's a children's drama' just because it's got children in. It's an adult drama, but you watch it because it takes you into a different world, and that's what I want Skins to do."
Elsley boasts that they have one of the youngest TV writing teams ever (the average age is 23, and they'd like to get it under 20 for series two). But he's upfront about the budgetary constraints. After today's brainstorming session, he has the headache of writing the Michelle episode. "I've volunteered to Channel 4 for this to be the cheap episode," he laughs, "so that means the absolute minimum number of supporting artists and locations."
Since the Skins team snapped her up, stand-up Josie Long's career has gone through the roof. But she says she's learnt a huge amount. "I'd never written drama before and suddenly it was 'wow you're making a glamorous TV show!'. The attraction for me was being able to meet other young writers in a workshopy way. I really love American comedy and I got very excited by the idea of team writing. As a stand-up you don't ever volunteer for criticism; you just go 'well this is what I think is funny'. It's your only way of having consistency, you need to have your own belief in it. But with scriptwriting you do draft after draft, and there's so much input and advice. You have to be a lot more open."
Skins will go out post-watershed: the characters drop pills, have sex, and push boundaries like only teenagers can. Writing authentic dialogue wasn't always easy, however. The Broadcasting Standards Codes rule against the use of certain words (which are the words that 16-year-olds use). Plus the writers also have to work within the constraints of the Child Protection Act. "It's a huge issue for us in terms of what we can depict," says Elsley. "We want to show life as it happens, but the Child Protection Act regulates against the depiction of teenage life as it actually happens."
Four months after the workshop, I watch a rough cut of the drama. The first episode - where Sid tries to lose his virginity - may seem slightly laddy. But hang in there for episode two (Cassie's story), which is a fantastically nuanced piece of writing. When it comes to the mysteries of puberty, Skins aims to communicate with teen audiences, while also reminding adults what it was really like. Yes they have more sex and better haircuts these days, but it does a great job of conveying the gaucherie of adolescence - the agony of teen politics.
"It's got lots of texture to it," says Long. "It doesn't just feel, 'Oh look, we're zeitgeisty and young'."
E4 insists there is no one target audience for Skins. It is billed as drama "for young people of all ages". "I don't just want to make it a drama that 16-year-olds feel they will watch," says Hopkinson. "Good stories are universal. I mean My mother watched This Life."
'Skins' is on E4 in the new year
It’s hard for television writers to hit just the right notes that make teenagers on television seem realistic. The characters have to be relatable and interesting at the same time, cool enough for audiences to like but not so far-fetched that their stories don’t resonate with viewers.
In general, U.S. television has done a pretty bad job of creating teenagers who seem like actual teenagers. Shows like The OC, Dawson’s Creek, Pretty Little Liars, and Gossip Girl (just to name a few) are fun to watch, but as a viewer, I never believed that their leading characters were ever real teenagers.
In contrast, there are at least four British teen shows released in the past ten years that feature a very different take on teenage life: Skins, The Inbetweeners, Some Girls, and My Mad Fat Diary manage to be compelling, funny, and insightful for both adult critics and teenage audiences.
What explains the difference? In part, it’s because American teen shows absurdly have high stakes—instead of dealing with the lives of typical teens, the teens on these shows deal with murder, huge amounts of money, and supernatural love stories. The British teen shows, on the other hand, are steeped in the mundane, with teens sorting through realistic problems of regular life.
While they’re popular in Britain, these shows have never really hit it big in the United States. Skins and The Inbetweeners were adapted for a U.S. market but were cancelled after one season. Skins is available only on DVD, and The Inbetweeners is still streaming on MTV.com, but neither have been widely distributed since cancellation.
Launching in 2007, Skins was the first of these British shows to air, breaking ground by casting a group of actual young people (many first-time actors) in the roles of high school teens and swapping its entire cast every two seasons. Like on American shows, the characters try to make their lives more interesting through partying, drugs, and hooking up.
But unlike most American shows, Skins is deeply rooted in feelings of helplessness, apathy, and anger. Without this social context, the behavior looks gratuitous, not genuine. This difference, coupled with the U.S. networks’ avoidance of “explicit” sexual content (even a naked backside played for laughs) makes the show uneven and confusing.
Then in 2008, The Inbetweeners debuted, running for three seasons. A much lighter comedy about suburban life, the show featured a foursome of teenage boys who were definitely not as cool as their Skins counterparts.
On the air right now are two new series: Some Girls, slated for a third season, and My Mad Fat Diary, which just wrapped its second season. Both feature female leads: Some Girls’ Viva (Adelayo Adedayo) and My Mad Fat Diary’s Rae (Sharon Rooney) act as chief protagonists and narrators for each girl’s trials and tribulations as they each attempt to navigate their surroundings. Some Girls is a comedy set in a London housing project, and My Mad Fat Diary, while comedic, is also decidedly dark, dealing with themes of mental illness and body image after Rae comes home from a secret stay in a psychiatric hospital.
What makes all these shows resonate is that instead of adult high stakes, Skins, The Inbetweeners, Some Girls, and My Mad Fat Diary are based on teenage stakes—whether someone likes you, how you’ll get along with a step parent, how to talk to a friend with a mental illness, and if it’s weird to think your doctor is cute.
But some of the major conflicts set up in these shows are based on class, bringing in much larger issues that affect the kids on an everyday basis. We see it in the food that Rae’s mother can afford in My Mad Fat Diary and in the physical division between the private school and the public school on Skins. In Some Girls, Viva and her friends live in a housing project, which serves as a grim backdrop to their everyday exploits. In The Inbetweeners, the main character Will enters public school because his mother and father have divorced and his mother can’t afford his private school. These themes show up in the U.S. remakes, but they feel clunky and out of place, as if hastily added to connect back to the original program.
Actually, in the U.S. versions of Skins and The Inbetweeners, everything feels a little clunky. Maybe it’s the acting, or the writing, or the look of the show, but they both feel a little off. The U.S. remakes borrow heavily from the original British programs, but also change key things, including bleeping certain swear words or eliminating them altogether.
Despite sharing a language, it’s also clear that British and American humour are very different. These British shows are grittier, dirtier, and often more risqué than their American counterparts would dare to be, which is part of the appeal for non-British audiences. The show’s writers can depict kids who aren’t afraid to swear, masturbate, sneak out of the house, or anything else onscreen that would be cause for handwringing across the pond.
In general, U.S. networks don’t have a great track record when it comes to adapting British TV shows. From Coupling to Gavin and Stacey, there aren’t that many programs that have survived the trip across the Atlantic. Sometimes crossover shows succeed, like Shameless and The Office, but especially when it comes to teen shows, American TV producers can’t seem to get it right.
The relationships between the outrageous and the mundane make these British teen shows attractive to teen audiences who see their uneven experiences reflected in the plot’s unpredictability. They hate their parents and also can’t do anything of substance without their help. The jokes are funny, but also very juvenile.
In short, these shows straddle the line between glamorizing teen life to the point that it’s unrecognizable, and creating one-note shows that trade in base humor and don’t allow their characters to have any humanity.
The closest American counterparts to these British series are the short-lived cult favorites My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, which both featured disaffected young people trying to fight the inevitability of aging into someone boring. ABC Family’s 2010 drama Huge, about girls at fat camp, was a hit with critics but was also cancelled after one season. MTV has found success in the “normal teen” genre with Awkward, about a socially awkward teen named Jenna (Ashley Rickards), and ABC Family has released The Fosters and Switched at Birth to receptive audiences.
MTV is developing the My Mad Fat Diary remake as a half-hour comedy (a pilot has been commissioned), rather than an hour-long drama, which will significantly alter how it approaches the heavier subject matter in the British original. Maybe MTV has learned from its earlier adaptation attempts and won’t try to mold British humor to fit American sensibilities but will instead give the new Rae a uniquely American voice that will resonate with her audience.
It might even pave the way for more interesting American shows about teenagers who are just trying to get by, even if it looks boring on the outside.
Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite is a writer and editor living in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter @manishaclaire.
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