Last Monday night on MTV, a new dramatic series premiered entitled Skins.  No, it isn’t about a touch football game.  But, they are trying to move society’s cultural goalposts.

Skins tells the story of a bunch of 15-year-old-or-so teenagers doing drugs, having sex, doing more drugs, sharing their teenage angst with each other, and basically doing every hedonistic thing that the scriptwriters could think of in order to boost this poor-excuse-for- a-television program’s ratings, such as showing the rear view of a 15-year-old boy, running naked down the street, freaking out over the effects of the Viagra that he’s taken.

Pitiful.

By the way, is it just me or does that picture remind you of a scene from the Spencer Tracy movie, Dante’s Inferno?  But I digress…

Per hollywoodreporter.com:

Executives at Viacom, MTV’s parent company have already reportedly told producers to tone down the show. Meanwhile, the Parents Television Council said this week that it’s urging the Department of Justice and U.S. Senate and House Judiciary Committees to open an investigation.

The group sent a statement to those organizations, saying:

In addition to the sexual content on the show involving cast members as young as 15, PTC counted 42 depictions and references to drugs and alcohol in the premiere episode.

It is clear that Viacom has knowingly produced material that may well be in violation of [several anti-child pornography laws],” added the PTC, which earlier called the show “the most dangerous program ever for children.

MTV responded:

Skins is a show that addresses real-world issues confronting teens in a frank way. We review all of our shows and work with all of our producers on an ongoing basis to ensure our shows comply with laws and community standards. We are confident that the episodes of ‘Skins’ will not only comply with all applicable legal requirements, but also with our responsibilities to our viewers.

Uh-huh.  Yeah, right.  And Snookie will win an Oscar someday.

The PTC also called for the boycotting of Taco Bell for advertising on the program.

Per Fox News, Taco Bell has since pulled their advertising from the program.

So has General Motors, after airing commercials for the Chevy Volt during the show’s premiere on Monday night.

According to one of the teen actors on the series, Sofia Black-D’elia, the content of the show is no big deal:

It’s pushing the boundaries for teen drama because I think Skins goes where other shows are afraid to.

The actress, who plays a teen lesbian on the program, made her remarks on the HDNet show Naughty But Nice With Rob earlier this week. 

This young lady also says: 

It’s what teens are doing. It’s the way teenagers believe, I think, especially you know in certain situations when you come from home lives where your parents don’t really support you or really listen to you. That’s what most of these kids are going through. And so, um, the drugs and the sex, they’re vices, and that’s what teenagers have.

Not the majority of them, sweetie-pie, even if the Progressives who run MTV desperately want them to be. 

Skins debuted Monday night with 3.3 million viewers. It is now MTV’s highest-rated new scripted series in the network’s key 12-34 demo – a 3.4 – which translates to roughly 2.7 million.

This fact is, it’s MTV’s only scripted series.  People slow down to look at a car wreck, too.

Like the new SyFy series, Being Human, this is not even a original series, but is an Americanized version of a program shown on the BBC.

Explains why Sharia Law is on the verge of taking over England, doesn’t it?

Time for another “It seems like it was just yesterday” moment:

The year was 1981.  I was just out of college, working in the Local Programming Department of my city’s Cablevision franchise.  One of the guys brought in a 3/4″ U-matic video tape of a new channel that was premiering called Music Television.  The tape had 3 videos on it:  Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight, a song by .38 Special, and a concept video by a group called Split Enz, One Step Ahead.

Later that year, MTV premiered with the aptly-titled song Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles. 

As with all great ideas, the Progressives eventually changed MTV into something that it was never meant to be.  They used MTV to attempt to change America’s cultural mores, first through music videos and genres, such as Heavy Metal and Rap, and later through racy reality series and live satellite-delivered programs from Spring Break in Florida.  The reality series became national water cooler topics,  like the one where they put a bunch of amoral losers in a house together, competing to be top dog.

As I mentioned before, it’s the train wreck effect, otherwise known as the “did-you-see-what happened-on-that-show-last-night-syndrome”.

With Skins, MTV and Viacom are once again attempting to move American Society’s Cultural Goalposts.  Only this time, it seems that they pushed the envelope too far, and Americans are pushing back.