Skins, "Tony" & "Cassie": Horny guy, hungry girl

Spoilers for the first two episodes of "Skins" coming up just as soon as I play with my food...

As I discussed in my column on Friday, I'm really glad I got to see more than the first episode of "Skins," and that BBC America was wise enough to show these two back to back.

By itself, "Tony" suggests a kind of show I'm not sure I would have much patience for, in an old man, "Get off my lawn, ya punks!" sort of way, that it's just going to be another tale of kids gone wild and the adults too clueless to understand or control them. Even though "Cassie" opens up with the kids waking up after a night of unsupervised hedonism, it quickly makes clear that the show doesn't have one specific worldview, or one specific style. The surreal qualities of "Cassie" provide a stark and intriguing contrast to the sniggering farce of sexual manners of "Tony," and made me look back on the first episode in a new light.

Outside of occasional interludes like the guys in the locker room with a naked Angie, "Cassie" is told so clearly from the point of view of its title character that it made me re-examine "Tony" and realize that this must be what life looks like through his eyes. He's young, he's handsome, he's clever and talented and can talk his way out of trouble, and he's got a hot girlfriend whose self-esteem is low enough that he can treat her shabbily (calling her "Nips" over her repeated protests, for instance) and she won't mind. Why wouldn't he view life as a never-ending party? Why wouldn't he assume that every woman, of every age, wants him?

"Cassie," meanwhile, unfolds with the logic of a dream. We don't know what's happened, how Cassie found herself in this place, or, initially, what that gooey substance dripping off her hands is. As often happens on this show, it seems, we're supposed to think of sex first when the real answer is something stranger or more innocent, like a massive food fight. It isn't clear at first that Cassie is hallucinating all those "EAT!" messages, but there comes a point where you begin to question the reality of anything happening here. Is Alan the cab driver even real? If so, is he really so sweet and innocent in his affection for Cassie, or is he a dirty old man and she's too hungry and tired to notice? Are her parents really the oblivious but well-meaning nymphomaniacs we see, or has Cassie chosen to view them entirely through that lens? Does she even really take a bite of that pub burger at the end?

Once I got past the point of view issue, I really grew to like the show's narrative and visual style, and the performances by most of these young actors. (One of the reasons Tony irritates me so much is because Nicholas Hoult is really good at playing that type of boy.) There's a playfulness to it that undercuts all the OMFG/end-times nature of the trouble the kids get into, like the way everybody's busy watching Anwar fail to pee when the car starts rolling into the harbor, or the way the one black student (is he Jal's brother?) shifts back into a proper British accent when none of the kids can decipher his hip-hop patois.

Some people who have seen the entirety of the series claims it falls off in quality after the first few episodes, or after the first season. (BBC America is going to show both seasons consecutively over the next few months.) I don't know -- and, as I did with "Doctor Who," I'm going to ask that nobody discuss or even allude to any plot details from episodes that have yet to air in America, or I'll delete those comments and get very cross -- but I'm intrigued to find out.

Some other thoughts on these two episodes:

• Like I said in the review, the stuff with Mad(ison) Twatter worked largely because the character is so strange and so funny. I sure didn't expect to see him at Cassie's support group, but the guy's so skinny that it makes sense.

• Cassie's demonstration to Sid of how she keeps her parents from noticing that she doesn't eat was both brilliant and terrifying. I feel like I'm going to spend the next 15 years of my daughter's life with my eyes glued to her plate at the dining room table.

• Other than the bleeping and some of the pixellation in scenes like Angie in the locker room, the most obvious difference between the British telecasts and the BBC America versions is that they slap on the subtitles whenever someone's accent gets especially thick. I first remember encountering that technique when I was in college reviewing a British indie film called "Riff-Raff" (with a young Robert Carlyle), and the entire movie had to be subtitled, because even though it was all in English, the distributor feared (in that case, quite rightly) that nobody would understand the dialogue otherwise. I do like how the subtitles here aren't confined to the minority or working-class characters, but that they pop up whenever Tony's around the rich girl from the other school.

• One thing I didn't pay attention to when I watched the original cut of "Tony": the music. Was BBC America able to use the original soundtrack, or did they have to swap out a lot of the tracks?

• It's a good thing Chris has no idea what "Dawson's Creek" is, or else he'd be embarrassed to realize that his crush on Angie is uncomfortably close to the story where Pacey slept with the hot teacher. (But the story works beause, as with Mad, Angie is written almost entirely for laughs.)

• Given my love of "Freaks and Geeks," "Undeclared," Brian Krakow, et al, it should be no surprise that I really enjoyed all the stuff with Sid, and am looking forward to his spotlight episode.

What did everybody else think?