If you've never heard of
Skins, it's a British program that follows a handful of teens as they cope with the stresses of life by getting drunk, vomiting, doing drugs, vomiting, having sex, and vomiting. It's fantastic. Here's the season 1 trailer.
(Note: Yes, that was the kid from Slumdog Millionaire.)
I also have a little theory about Skins...it's what the Harry Potter series would be like if all the characters were real people (at least for the first two seasons). And by real people, I mean an entirely new set of fictional people.
In the beginning of Skins, our protagonist is Tony Stonem (the series then focuses on one character per episode, but that's unimportant right now). Tony is exactly what Harry Potter would be if he were a real person- how do I put this- a total dick. He's played by Nicholas Hoult, who, apart from being a stone cold fox, is also the actor who played the awkward little kid in About a Boy. Think about it. A little boy that everyone loves who drops off the radar when he's young and then shows up as a teen in school? Yeah, that's Harry Potter.
Harry's bff, Ron Weasley, finds his Skins counterpart in Sid, (obviously, Tony's best friend). Tell me this isn't a conversation real-life Harry and Ron would have...
Tony (Harry): Tonight we go to a party and you finally pop the cherry. You finally get the VIP tour of Neverland. You finally...
Sid (Ron): Fuck off. Not "finally."
Tony: Well, it's embarrassing.
Sid: It's common and quite normal for someone of sixteen...
Tony: No. It's embarrassing, Sid.
Sid: Shit. Alright, how?
Tony: We go to the party, and we get a girl catastrophically spliffed up. In her confused state, she comes to believe, however momentarily, that you are attractive enough to shag.
Note: To the best of my knowledge, "getting spliffed up" is the equivalent of being under a babbling curse, a confundus charm, and a jelly-brain jinx...with a hankering to accio some snacks immediately.
Skins has a Luna Lovegood too- Cassie. In addition to looking exactly like Luna, she's suicidal and is a (sometimes) recovering anorexic. Granted, this isn't exactly the same as losing your shoes and talking about nargles all the time, but, hey, J.K. Rowling loves a good metaphor.
The one person Tony doesn't constantly put down and manipulate is his younger sister Effy. I know this is going to a weird place cause Harry and Ginny are an item in the books, but for the purposes of this post, Effy is a real-life Ginny Weasley. They both have fabulous names, and at one point, Tony has to save Effy from the real world version of a basilisk under the control of the memory of an evil lord in a secret lair. Meaning, Effy gets kidnapped by Tony's ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend and is given too many drugs at a country club rave. TOTALLY THE SAME.
Oh, and if you're still not convinced, let's take a look at the shared plot points:
- ODing = being petrified
- driving your car into a river = flying your car into an enchanted tree
- getting your clarinet broken = getting your wand broken
- having your dad die in the middle of the night = having your godfather vanish through a mysterious curtain
- getting pregnant and then having an abortion without knowing that your boyfriend has a congenital disorder that causes him to suffer from subarachnoid hemorrhages = wait, what?
