Teen TV Translations: Across the Pond

Abstract

British youth television is intricately intertwined with US teen TV, with its original drama in part developing its voice through a dialogue with imported US texts. But this is not a one-way relationship, as the US 2011–2012 television season debuted three adaptations of British youth drama’s first wave. Skins (E4, 2007–2013), The Inbetweeners (E4, 2008–2010) and Being Human (BBC Three, 2008–2013) were translated by basic cable channels MTV and Syfy, and became part of a long history of transatlantic televisual flow. Here we see the US market attempting to assimilate British programmes that, as the previous chapter demonstrated, were closely bound to national televisual identity through space, language and storytelling. Exploring messy swirl of discourse surrounding these transatlantic translations serves to further define British youth television, as it offers a rich source for exploration of disjuncture and difference between American and British youth representations. As a result, I focus on the two MTV translations over Syfy’s Being Human (2011–2014), as the latter was assimilated into the channel’s telefantasy norm rather than defined as a youth text. In examining the critical and industrial discourse surrounding Skins US (MTV, 2011) and The Inbetweeners US (MTV, 2012),1 I identify how British youth drama was received, reworked and assimilated into US cultural representations and televisual expectations of youth narratives.