MTV The ensemble cast of MTV's new teen drama Skins, in a rare sober, mostly clothed moment 
 
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 If there's one industry in which America has never run an export deficit, it is young lust. And MTV  which is to that market sector what GM was to cars in the '50s  has always been able to source material right here in the good old U.S.A., from its first hair-metal videos to the latest episode of Jersey Shore. 
 
 But MTV's scripted series have had a harder time matching the success of its randy dating shows and anything-goes reality soaps. So the network's latest attempt is an import, of a sort. Skins (Mondays, 10 p.m. E.T.) began life as a racy British model, a teen dramedy that was remarkable  and controversial  not so much for the amount of sex and drugs its teen ensemble enjoyed as for the show's lack of judgment about it. (See the top 10 TV series of 2010.) 
 
 MTV hired Bryan Elsley, who created the show for Britain's Channel 4 with his then 19-year-old son Jamie Brittain, to adapt it for the U.S. The new version is slightly tamer than the original, mostly in language, though few viewers will suspect that, what with all the sex-toy references and the conversation between one character and a preteen kid about the merits of different types of joint-rolling paper. 
 
 The pilot begins with manipulative, slick-talking clique leader Tony (James Newman) working his cell phone in a serial call that introduces most of the ensemble cast. He's plotting to find a girl to whom his introverted friend Stanley (Daniel Flaherty) can lose his virginity; this eventually develops into a plan to score a load of pot and sell it at a party. It all goes wrong, of course, but ends not in jail or regret or life lessons but in a pileup of slapstick, poignant connections and laughter. If you're a parent and reaching for the Maalox after reading this, that's Skins doing its job. (See TIME's photos of teenagers growing up across the nation.) 
 
 Pleasure Without the Guilt 
 
 There's far more flesh, swearing and toking on Skins than on the edgiest CW soap, but what may be most shocking to an American audience is how insouciantly it defies teen TV's unwritten mandate of consequences. On U.S. teen dramas, you can titillate the audience with bad behavior so long as, at some point, there's a pregnancy scare or a cautionary drug overdose. Like the Prohibition-era winemaking kits that instructed the buyer never to let the contents ferment, teen soaps adhere to the agreed-upon fiction that they are bulwarks against the things they are actually delivery systems for. 
 
 Skins, like the movies Superbad and Dazed and Confused, instead admits that teenagers seek out sex and drugs because they feel good. Whether or not this is responsible, it's more forthright. (Consequences are a fraught subject for shows about teenagers anyway; see MTV's Teen Mom, where the wages of adolescent pregnancy are reality stardom.) On Skins, the characters do drugs and have sex and have a deep core of sadness. But they don't have a core of sadness because they do drugs and have sex. Nor, necessarily, is it the other way around. (See five little-known truths about Americans' sex lives.) 
 
 How realistic is the show? That's for your kids to know and for you hopefully never to find out. (MTV's Skins, like the U.K.'s, boasts a staff of "advisory teenagers.") But the lack of melodrama doesn't make it flippant. The characters come from middle- to lower-middle-class homes in an unnamed, grimy Rust Belt city (there's money around, but their families generally don't have it), and they have real problems. Cadie (Britne Oldford) has drug issues and a history of hospitalization; Chris (Jesse Carere) fends for himself after his single mother ditches him; we first see Tony's sister Eura (Eleanor Zichy) staggering home disheveled at the crack of dawn. 
 
 Skins' biggest challenge will be finding its American voice. (The same can be said of Showtime's new family-poverty drama Shameless, another transgressive Channel 4 series exported to the U.S.) Most of the episodes screened for critics are derivative of the British original, and it doesn't help that the exteriors, shot in Toronto, look unmistakably Canadian. But at least it has strong source material. The show is constructed like a novel in stories, each episode after the ensemble-based pilot breaking down one character while drawing surprising connections among the rest. (See the top 10 TV episodes of 2010.) 
 
 For all its cheekiness and raunch, Skins has more sweetness than snarky teen soaps like Gossip Girl. In one telling glimpse, we see that lesbian cheerleader Tea (Sofia Black-D'Elia), the one new character in the U.S. version, has a tattoo, in an intimate area, of an E. E. Cummings verse: "i carry your heart with me/ i carry it in my heart." This is the secret of this unsettling, flawed but ambitious show: it wears its heart on its skin. 
 
 See TIME's Top 10 Everything of 2010. ||||| "Skins" is a wildly popular and controversial British series about a clique of ferociously uninhibited and self-absorbed teenagers who do everything they're not supposed to and regard grownups with complete disdain, with few to no consequences. Naturally, MTV would like a piece of that. 
 
 Before trying to make sense of the American version (premiering Monday night) or determine if "Skins" has landed on anything more culturally relevant than, say, "Porky's," you should know that this "Skins" carries a stern TV-MA rating and is on the receiving end of the highest possible scorn from the Parents Television Council, which took one look at it and all but exploded. Just as MTV probably hoped and prayed it would. 
 
 I usually roll my eyes at the PTC's fretful, tut-tutting alerts, but after watching four episodes of "Skins" (the title is slang for cigarette rolling papers) my panties are in a bit of a twist, too: By and large, "Skins" is a repugnant, irredeemably nihilistic viewing experience for grownups - the very thing for which "off" buttons are made. 
 
 For actual teenagers, "Skins" might be something of a vicarious thrill, in which a scheming, savvy twerp named Tony (James Newman) arranges a debauched social life for himself and his other working-class friends, each of whom have their own overblown emotional issues and troubles at home. Imagine a kid with Ferris Bueller's self-assurance and Eddie Haskell's duplicity plunked down with his ethnically diverse peers in a den filled with drugs, porn and a stack of unmade "ABC Afterschool Special" scripts with the final scenes (i.e., the saccharine conclusions) torn out. 
 
 MTV's "Skins" replicates characters and storylines from the UK original, sometimes page for page, which leaves it feeling too foreign. The show's hook is that it is cast with real-life teenagers instead of the usual business of getting older actors to play teenagers - a practice as ancient as "Rebel Without a Cause" (James Dean was 23 when that film was made) and as current as last year's "Easy A," a high-school-as-"Scarlet Letter" farce. 
 
 Besides unknown, young performers, many of the show's writers and "advisers" are in their late teens and early 20s, ostensibly lending their special sense of verity to dialogue and situations. The British creator of "Skins," Bryan Elsley, says he got his idea when his son told him that teenagers would know best how to make a show about teenagers. 
 
 Well, guess what? The show Elsley's son and other kids helped make (and have now remade) is the TV equivalent of leaving teens alone for a weekend - they invite all their friends over and trash the place. What remains is an empty and ruined feeling, much like watching Larry Clark's "Kids," a 1995 cinema-verite downer that also had a way of making teenagers seem far more uncaring than most humans can truly be. 
 
 The makers of "Skins" are on to something, however: In fictional stories about teen misbehavior, viewers of all ages tend to expect and even demand recompense, or at least a moral reckoning, which "Skins" is unwilling to supply, lest it somehow compromise its authenticity. 
 
 Therefore, you would think a show like "Skins," which brags about its realism, wouldn't feel so fake and . . . Canadian. Originally set for Baltimore, "Skins" was instead filmed in urban Toronto, using mostly Canadian kids, and the producers seem to think Americans won't notice. So much of our cheap and limitless programming now, seen everywhere from NBC to MTV to HGTV, has a telltale and even aggravating Canadian-ness about it; the only way "Skins" could possibly feel more Ottawan is if Alanis Morissette popped up wearing a Mountie uniform and sang a new song called "Oot n' Aboot" while helping some "Property Virgins" find a renovated two-bedroom condo. 
 
 That said, "Skins" does occasionally reach for whatever heart is left in its imaginary, dysthymic youth culture - whether through the story of a lesbian (Sofia Black-D'Elia) who lives in a big, noisy Italian family, or through a pill-popping young man (Jesse Carere) who wakes to discover his mother has left him home alone, for good. 
 
 "Skins" is so determined to relate to hardened kids - without sermon, theme or context - that it accidentally discovers a new frontier in phoniness and filth. Even if I could warp time and watch it as my teenaged self, I'm pretty sure I would have been bored by it back then, too - even with all the sex . Never have I been more sure of my generation's battle cry: SAVE FERRIS. The "Skins" kids insist they are beyond rescue, so don't bother. 
 
 Skins (one hour) premieres Monday at 10 p.m. on MTV.
– MTV debuted its new series Skins last night, an American version of a British teen drama rife with sex and drugs. Not everybody's a fan: Richard Lawson, Gawker: It goes even further than the Brit version in pushing the idea that teens are "messy jumbles of extremes with very little shading in between, lacking in kindness, decorum, and any sense of responsibility or consequence. It's a pretty bleak and unfair characterization. Teenagers are dumb, yes, but they're not monsters (not all of them at least). I wish television and movies would stop trying to tell us they are." Hank Stuever, Washington Post: It feels "fake," he writes. It's "so determined to relate to hardened kids—without sermon, theme or context—that it accidentally discovers a new frontier in phoniness and filth. Even if I could warp time and watch it as my teenaged self, I'm pretty sure I would have been bored by it back then, too—even with all the sex." James Poniewozik, Time: "What may be most shocking to an American audience is how insouciantly it defies teen TV's unwritten mandate of consequences. On US teen dramas, you can titillate the audience with bad behavior so long as, at some point, there's a pregnancy scare or a cautionary drug overdose." Not so here. Still, he adds, "for all its cheekiness and raunch, Skins has more sweetness than snarky teen soaps like Gossip Girl."