Comedy
Dead Boy Detectives
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
Bethan lies.
Not just a little. Not just every once in a while. Not just to save someone’s feelings. No, Bethan lies to most everyone most of the time for most any reason at all.
And if you walked in Bethan’s 16-year-old shoes, perhaps you’d want to lie a little, too.
Secondary school in this corner of Great Britain is tough enough, really. It’s stocked with your typical alottment of school characters, from Queen Bee Poppy to jerkish bully Stan Priest. Sure, Bethan has a couple of good mates—drug-addled Lydia and witty, gay Travis—but they’re definitely part of the sneering, back-row-sitting section of school. I mean, Bethan’s smart, but to excel too much might just get her blackballed from that little clique, as well.
So she lies about the poetry she writes and how close to home it hits. She lies about why she never invites her friends over, or why she might miss the occasional party. She suggests (ever-so-wearily) that her family is ever-so-rich and her parents are ever-so square: They care about what she does, Bethan insists.
Truth is, Bethan’s parents are in no condition to care.
Her mother, Katrina, has a good excuse as to why she’s such a terrible one. She’s bipolar—liable to sing toward her neighbor’s windows at 2 a.m. and swear they’re all part of a conspiracy to kill her 12 hours later. She’s been in and out of institutions for years now, and this time, the hospital Bethan just took her to might be her new, permanent, home.
Bethan’s dad, Dilwyn, has no such excuse. He’s often drunk and always terrifying, and he cares far more about where his next pint is coming from than where his daughter’s going.
With both parents unable or unwilling to be, well, parents, Bethan’s the de facto head of the home—washing the dishes and paying the bills and visiting her rattled mom whenever she can. She forges parental notes, too, and conjures up elaborate, interlocking stories.
While some people moan that their life’s a lie, for Bethan, that’s perhaps the closest to the truth that she’ll ever get.
In My Skin, originally produced by the BBC and now airing in the United States on Hulu, has been called by some a black comedy. And sure, it has some funny moments. But honestly, it’s hard to laugh at much here.
First, the themes are just too raw, and the actress playing Bethan (Gabrielle Creevy) is just too effective. You simply want to help the girl somehow, not chuckle at her misfortunes. When Katrina manically dances and sings and washes her car in the dead of night, you feel Bethan’s sadness and terror. When she embarrasses herself in gym class, maybe the show intends it to be funny—and yet only bully Stan laughs. Bethan certainly doesn’t.
But then comes the content—the sex, the drugs, the language—and that’s hardly the stuff of giggles, either.
Before four minutes have passed in the first episode, Bethan’s friends have gotten drunk, taken drugs, tossed out an impressive assortment of profanities and discussed a graphic sexual scandal involving a classmate. It doesn’t get much better from there. As the show runs along, same-sex attractions and relations seem more common than heterosexual ones. A teen girl sleeps with a much older man, too.
Bethan doesn’t buy into all the bad behavior. She takes the pills offered to her by her friends and secretly throws them away. Instead of scorning her parents, she in large part takes care of them. She’s an island of responsibility in a sea of hedonistic chaos, searching for real meaning and connection in an environment that practically scoffs at it.
But Bethan’s merits aside, In My Skin continues the sad, recent trend of teen-centric shows that suggests today’s adolescents live in a largely moral-free wasteland, filled with sex and drugs and petty feuds. And while I’m sure this sort of story does capture the lives of some teens, it also tells those whose schools or friends or lives don’t look like this that they’re the ones who are abnormal. Even if somehow you could navigate all the surface concerns this show has—the sex, the drugs, the lying, the language—that overarching issue is reason enough to push pause.In My Skin is all about a teen who lies. But from where we lie, this show shouldn’t be watched by them.
Bethan takes her mom in to a psychiatric hospital and struggles with writing a poem that her teacher wants to “speak from the heart.” But that sort of raw truth isn’t Bethan’s scene. Her best friends know nothing of her real, terrible home life: Bethan tells them that her parents just took her to see the musical Chicago (she promises to bring them a program) and the fam plans to fly to Italy for the summer.
The first poem Bethan submits is a love poem—one that may have been written (the accompanying, non-explicit fantasy sequence suggests) about a female classmate of hers. Bethan’s mother dances in the street in her nightie and seems to make a long-distance come-on to a neighbor (who’s shouting at her to be quiet). Teens discuss prostitution, joke about homosexuality (and make reference to sexual activity) crudely talk about body parts and sex toys and gossip about how one of their classmates allegedly had intimate relations with a frozen sausage. Bethan’s father, Dilwyn, hangs up what may be a photo of a naked woman in the hallway (the picture is obscured by shadow), and Bethan says that when she was younger, one of her friends discovered that Dilwyn kept a wardrobe full of porn mags. When the friend told classmates about it, Bethan flipped the script and said that it was her friend’s father who actually had the mags.
Bethan lies about plenty of other things, too, and admits she’s been doing it since she was 8 years old.
Bethan drinks with friends Lydia and Travis. Lydia shares drugs with her pals, too (Alprazolam, which often goes under the brandname Xanax), leaving all three very impaired (or, in Bethan’s case, at least appearing to be so). Lydia vomits on the grass and someone else accidentally steps in it. Later, Lydia and Bethan commiserate over the lectures their mothers gave them on the dangers of drinking and drugs. (Bethan’s lying, of course, but goes so far as to take a selfie of herself shooting a shot of breath spray into her mouth to, she says, cover up the smell of alcohol.)
We learn that Bethan hates her often-drunk, threatening father. (As he spits phlegm into the sink, which he does every morning, she tells viewers that she fantasizes about stabbing him in the back.) She starts menstruating during gym class, and blood leaks on her gym shorts. (A school bully mocks her crassly and relentlessly.) A teacher makes reference to a dog’s “stool sample.” Bethan’s mother tells Bethan spitefully, “I told you I had a baby girl who died. She’s prettier than you.” Characters say the f-word 16 times, the s-word four times and the c-word once. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “h—,” “d–k” and “tw-t.” God’s name is misused four times, and Jesus’ name is abused once.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
An elf mage contemplates on connection and regret as she watches her human friends grow old and pass away.
