Did MTV learn nothing from 'Skins'? The American adaptation of 'The Inbetweeners' aired for the first time on MTV overseas on Monday night, stripped
of any of the originality, charm and humour
that the earlier version had when it debuted in the UK in 2008. I can
assure you now, this is no “the first one is the best” or “Brits do it better”
debate, it is merely a fact of the matter that the first episode was undoubtedly sub-par.
Joey Pollari plays Will, an ex-private school numpty that is
forced into normal education after his parent’s divorce. He meets and is stuck with three of the most
gormless teenagers you’ve ever witnessed: Simon (Bubba Lewis), Jay (Zack
Pearlman), and Neil (Mark L. Young), who are all somewhere ‘in between’ the
nerds forced to stand up against a wall during lunch, and actually standing a
chance of losing their virginity by the time school finishes.
MTV needs to make scripted
comedy take a backseat instead of shoving it to the forefront as it has done for
too long. The ‘M’ currently stands for ‘miscellaneous’. Maybe even ‘mediocre’
in a sea of bland teen oriented shows. Even the great 'Awkward' has slipped
into generic territory, with the current season revolving almost entirely
around a love triangle...which seems like a pretty lazy route to take.
Although it seems like a tough critique of a show that has
only aired one episode, 'The Inbetweeners' already shows signs of slipping into
standard teenage nothingness. While there will be those that find the show
hilarious, it is doubtful that the proposed 12-episode series will run smoothly
without criticism and without comparison to MTV’s version of 'Skins', a show that received
mass amounts of flack for being the same as the British version- only much
worse.
Finally the bleeped language was killing me. Either do it properly, or don't do it at all.
