The sins of ‘Skin’

How good, how true to life, does television need to be? Much of it -- most of it, probably -- is neither good nor true to life. Does it matter?

I have been thinking of this, because I have been thinking (perhaps too hard) about Jerry Bruckheimer’s new series, “Skin,” which debuts Monday and is not very good or true to life at all. It is made all of pasteboard and piles the ludicrous upon the unlikely on top of the intellectually sloppy. It has nevertheless generated a lot of buzz and whir because it is set partly against the background of the Southern California porn industry: Smut peddler’s daughter falls for district attorney’s son. Fathers clash. It’s a high-concept project: “Romeo and Juliet” meets “Boogie Nights.” High concept, of course, often means low substance. But none of these things are inimical to mass appeal. Perhaps they are what guarantee it.

Long ago, when double features and drive-ins still roamed the Earth, movies were divided into A pictures(like “Gone With the Wind”) and B (like “The Blob”). What distinguished the “Bs” ultimately from the A’s was that little was expected from them. It was taken for granted, by the people who made them and the people who watched them, that they would be slightly less good. They not only were cheaper than A pictures, but often less well acted, and very often less well written. No one expected them to be art (though occasionally they were anyway -- James Whale’s “Frankenstein” or Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing”), or even smart.

The “Bs” faded in the age of television, which effectively took their place -- relative to the big screen -- as the medium of the less expensive, the less prestigious, the less good. (That television also produces work as good or better than what you can see at the movies has not dispelled the lingering notion that it is the lesser medium -- perhaps because it’s free.)

Then, in the 1970s, the phenomenal success of “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which were essentially old Saturday morning serials writ expensively large, blurred the lines between the A and the B -- inverted them, in fact. Movies became roller coasters; they were assembled with an eye to centrifugal force. These films were expensive and sometimes full of stars, but they were B pictures under the glitz, depending on flashy effects and theater-rattling low frequencies to cover their plot holes, the flatness of their characters, the paucity of ideas.

Among the founders of this brave new world were Bruckheimer and his partner, the late Don Simpson -- the man some say invented “high concept” and who perfected the now-standard three-act Hollywood movie. With a few marked exceptions, Bruckheimer’s career has been profitably devoted to the loud, fast, dumb, sexy, violent and sometimes flag-waving, from “Top Gun” and “Con Air” to this summer’s monster hits “Bad Boys II” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” And he has successfully transferred this aesthetic to television, where his growing “CSI” franchise rivals that of “Law & Order” for size, and his brand has become as identifiable as Norman Lear’s, Steven Bochco’s or David E. Kelley’s.

Now comes “Skin,” which makes six Bruckheimer shows now running or scheduled. I would care to make no predictions about its success. On the face of it, it promised to be one of the fall season’s most offbeat new shows. Though pornography itself is much alluded to on television, in sitcom jokes and cop-show plot lines, there has certainly never been a television series where one of the main characters is a pornographer, and certainly not one who is meant to be more or less likable. (Though real-life pornographer Adam Glasser, a.k.a. Seymore Butts, is the focus of a Showtime reality series, “Family Business.”)

But it turns out to be not so offbeat after all -- just a familiar blend of sound and fury, of raised voices, overripe dialogue, locked antlers, jiggy pop tunes and MTV-style edits (at least 44 in the first minute). It pushes no significant edge and compared to the other Bruckheimer series is actually a model of decorum. Apart from a few girls dancing in theatrical underwear, and a bare back or two, it is relatively chaste. Practically “7th Heaven.”

Of course, that it runs on a broadcast network and not on cable -- long a hotbed of, um, hot beds -- means that the pornography will be implicit.

Except for a fleeting reference to a “girl-girl” scene, “having sex” is as technical as the talk gets. Any random soap opera is hotter. But the producers -- Bruckheimer, Jonathan Littman and creator Jim Leonard (of the short-lived though charming “Thieves”) -- have said repeatedly that porn is not the point. Well, it may not be the point, but it is the hook.

A sloppy pilot

The pilot episode -- that is, the one over which unusual care has been lavished -- is as poorly written as it is visually polished. It teeters constantly on the edge of unintentional comedy and seems never to have been given a close read. As when L.A. D.A. Thomas Roam (Kevin Anderson) announces that “my office has one concern and one concern only -- and that is to keep our children safe,” as if fraud and petty theft and most of the other 60,000 felonies and 200,000 misdemeanors the district attorney’s office prosecutes in a year were chopped liver. Or when the porn king’s daughter Jewel (Olivia Wilde) is told by her mother (Pamela Gidley), “You just have to make a choice. You have to choose to stop seeing him.” Which is not a choice.

Or when Roam phones Larry Goldman (Ron Silver) at home in the middle of the night -- a number he wouldn’t know and that would not be listed. Or when Goldman sweats a $2-billion check out of a couple of seasoned businessmen -- you’d have to think they were seasoned if they could write a $2-billion check -- by calling in a few porn stars to dance (clothed) on a table. Or when Jewel meets hunky Adam (D.J. Cotrona), the D.A.’s son, at the bottom of a swimming pool and they stare wide-eyed underwater at each other. Or when they find, without searching, the car keys she has tossed off a roof, conveniently close to the car they fit. This is James Bond logic, and not the Connery Bonds but the ones with Roger Moore.

Silver’s porn king is meant to be something of a hard guy at work and a softy at home -- I read it as a kind of amalgamated portrait of Bruckheimer and the unseemly Simpson. Silver goes all Pacino once or twice, but he’s a nice actor to have in the neighborhood.

As the D.A. who has sworn to destroy him, Anderson -- who gave a nuanced performance as an ambivalent priest in the series “Nothing Sacred” a few years back -- looks merely dyspeptic. He bustles around town looking tough, with his campaign manager, plucky little Laura Leighton from “Melrose Place,” rarely more than two steps away and sometimes ... well, closer than she should be. He seems like the kind of boss his staff would call funny names behind his back, but this hasn’t happened in the two episodes available for review.

Each is less a character than a “concept” -- the faithful homebody pornographer, more sinned against than sinning; the righteous D.A. with a dirty secret and a broken family. (Rachel Ticotin is Anderson’s hard-nosed wife, and a judge.) There’s no sense of who they are, of where they come from, or why they’re doing what they’re doing instead of anything else -- as to why Silver makes porn as opposed to, say, ladies’ hats, or widgets. As to why someone hasn’t bashed Anderson over the head. Star-crossed lovers Cotrona and Wilde are particularly inarticulate, even by the standards of real teenagers; they have little to say to each other past “I love you” and “I love you more.” Apart from that, they have no evident interests, desires or friends. Their affair is sweet, and sad, and dull.

And yet I wonder whether I’m asking too much from this show, and from television. Given that it’s the medium most people swim in most of the time, it seems right to. But maybe logical consistency and character depth are truly things of the past, relics of pre-postmodernism, and I just haven’t woken up to the fact. And, after all, who doesn’t love some indefensible television show or album or potboiler?

Indeed, one of the perquisites of pop culture, as opposed to the kind they put in museums, is that it doesn’t have to defend itself. It has the right to be trash. There are people for whom “Bad Boys II” may represent the ultimate cinematic experience -- or “Deep Throat,” for that matter. All I can say is: “Enjoy.”

*

‘Skin’

When: 9-10 p.m. Mondays, premieres Monday.

Where: Fox.

Rating: The network has rated the show TV-14DLS (may not be suitable for children under age 14, with advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language and sex).

Ron Silver: Larry Goldman

Kevin Anderson: Thomas Roam

D.J. Cotrona: Adam Roam

Olivia Wilde: Jewel Goldman

Rachel Ticotin: Laura Roam

Pamela Gidley: Barbara Goldman

Production credits: Creator, writer, Jim Leonard; executive producers, Jerry Bruckheimer, Jonathan Littman, Leonard; director, Russell Mulcahy