MTV's naked calculation gone bad

New York: What if one day you went to work and there was a meeting to discuss whether the project you were working on crossed the line into child pornography? You'd probably think you had ended up in the wrong room.

And you'd be right.

Last week, my colleague Brian Stelter reported that on Tuesday, the day after the pilot episode of "Skins" was shown on MTV, executives at the cable channel were frantically meeting to discuss whether the salacious teenage drama starring actors as young as 15 might violate federal child pornography statutes.

Senior executives are now considering additional editing for coming episodes, but that's a little like trying to lock the door after a naked 17-year-old has already busted out and gone running down the street, which is precisely what one of the characters does in Episode 3 -- with a pill-enhanced erection, no less.

No one at MTV, which is owned by Viacom, set out to make child pornography, but make no mistake: the series is meant to provoke. "Skins" -- a title that derives from the rolling papers that are used to make the blunts that go with the vodka that washes down the pills that accompany the hookups -- is mostly about explicitly teenage characters doing explicit things. In a cluttered programming era, controversy is oxygen, so MTV was undoubtedly happy with the tsk-tsking the show incited in advance.

But objectifying teenage pathology, along with teenage bodies, is a complicated business -- and the business that MTV is in.

I've watched the first three episodes of "Skins," and I have no idea if the show is "sufficiently sexually suggestive," as the law reads, to run afoul of the authorities. What "Skins" does clearly suggest is that MTV and its corporate parent erred when they decided that conjuring a show out of piles of semi-nude teenagers would be lucrative, harmless fun.

"Skins" has a TV-MA rating and MTV has suggested in press releases that the show is "specifically designed to be viewed by adults." That's a preposterous position. "Skins" is a show meant to offend adults and create did-you-see chatter among young people.

That plan was in high effect last week, including a much-covered launch party catering to teenagers in New York and a huge boom of attention on Twitter and Facebook. The unusually large audience of 3.3 million for the first episode included over a million people who had to get up for high school or elementary school in the morning.

When I went home on Wednesday and checked the DVR log, the pilot was there, waiting for inspection by my 14-year-old daughter, who confirmed that yes, everybody at school was talking about it.

Now that MTV is back on its heels, you will hear arguments that "Skins" merely describes the world that we already live in. There's something to that. MTV didn't invent "friends with benefits," oral sex as the new kiss or stripper chic as a teenage fashion aspiration. And MTV didn't employ the teenage star that posed semi-nude in Vanity Fair; the Disney Channel is the one in business with Miley Cyrus.

But when you hear talk about how innovative and daring "Skins" is -- and you will --that argument is no more credible than the one made by the stoned teenager out after curfew. "Skins" is pretty much a frame-by-frame capture of a British hit. "Kids," the film by director Larry Clark, plowed the same seamy ground back in 1995. (And films, at least, are more regulated: "Kids" initially received an NC-17 rating, which meant that some of the youngsters who were in the film could not legally see it.)

"Skins" is nothing new, only a corporate effort to clone a provocative drama that will make MTV less dependent on reality shows and add to the bottom line. True, MTV is not alone. Abercrombie & Fitch built a brand out of writhing, half-naked teenagers, as Calvin Klein once did.

But since its inception, MTV has pushed this boundary as hard as any major media company ever has and may have finally crossed a line that will be hard to scramble back across. The self-described "Guidos" and "Guidettes" of "Jersey Shore," MTV's breakout hit, have probably already set some kind of record for meaningless sex.

(More questionably, MTV exported the show to some countries with the tagline, "Get Juiced," a clear reference to the obvious steroid use on the show.)

But while Snooki & Co. may act like children, they can legally drink alcohol and give consent to what might ensue: the age of 21 may seem like an arbitrary distinction but it's an important one and, besides, it's the law.

Even in the most scripted reality programming, the waterfall of poor personal choices is interrupted by comeuppance. People get painful hangovers, the heartbreaks are real if overly dramatic and the cast members have to live with their decisions.

Not so on "Skins," where a girl who overdoses and is rushed to the hospital wakes up to laughter when the stolen S.U.V. taking her there slams to a halt. Teenagers show children how to roll blunts, bottles of vodka are traded on merry go-rounds, and youngsters shrug off being molested and threatened by a drug dealer. And when the driver of the stolen S.U.V. gets distracted and half a dozen adolescents go rolling into a river, the car is lost but everyone bobs to the surface with a smile at the wonder of it all.

Any adults on "Skins" are of the Charlie Brown variety, feckless beings who are mostly heard off-screen making bummer noises. MTV leaves it to real-life parents to explain that sometimes, when a car goes underwater, nobody survives and that a quick hookup with cute boy at the party may deliver a sexually transmitted disease along with a momentary thrill.

The blowback to the show has so far been containable. Taco Bell -- owned by a public company that, unlike MTV, is not interested in courting controversy -- withdrew its commercials from the show. Fox News hosts have thundered about it, too, but MTV can probably ride that stuff out as long as it doesn't end up in legal trouble. But should it?

"Even if you decide that this show is not out-and-out evil and that the show is legal from a technical perspective, that doesn't really eliminate the significant social and ethical issues it raises," said Chris MacDonald, a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto's Clarkson Center for Business Ethics and author of the Business Ethics Blog. "Teenagers are both sexual beings and highly impressionable, and because of that, they're vulnerable to just these kinds of messages. You have to wonder if there isn't a better way to make a living."

There is. You could produce a show that clearly depicts what happens when kids do only what they want and exercise some poor judgment. There's already a very good one on MTV, by the way. It's called "Teen Mom."