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'Skin' Has A Little More Than Sex Going For It
October 18, 2003

Fox's latest drama, "Skin," has all the ingredients of a big fat hit: love, sex, money, sex, politics, sex, a catchy title, sex, a classic theme, sex, an attractive cast, sex, sex and sex.

Plus, it has a lot of sex, which doesn't hurt.

Before the sensitive reach for their smelling salts, they may want to know that "Skin" is based loosely on "Romeo and Juliet," the sexiest of Shakespeare's plays. Or did you think all that adolescent moping and moaning was about platonic friendship?

31403'Skin'
Jewel (Olivia Wilde) and Adam (D.J. Cotrona) struggle with their forbidden relationship in 'Skin,' a Shakespearean-inspired drama set in Los Angeles.
Photo/File
Jewel (Olivia Wilde) and Adam (D.J. Cotrona) struggle with their forbidden relationship in "Skin," a Shakespearean-inspired drama set in Los Angeles.
 

The setting is modern Los Angeles. Her family is white and Jewish, his Mexican-Irish - but it's something more than ethnicity that comes between Jewel Goldman and Adam Roam (newcomers Olivia Wilde and D.J. Cotrona).

As fate would have it, entrepreneur Larry Goldman (Ron Silver, "The West Wing") is a hugely successful producer of adult entertainment, while L.A. District Attorney Thomas Roam (Kevin Anderson, "Nothing Sacred") is an anti-porn crusader who believes Goldman is trafficking in the worst sort of hard-core stuff. This battle of Dad vs. Dad soon becomes a classic clash of Capulet vs. Montague, with Jewel and Adam caught in the middle.

The family conflict takes place on another level as well. Though they're not wealthy, Thomas and Laura Roam (Rachel Ticotin, "American Family") - she's a judge - embody the respectability of the establishment. Larry and Barbara Goldman (Pamela Gidley, "The Pretender") - she's a socialite - have all the wealth they could want, but their money has an unsavory aroma.

Potboiler though it is, "Skin" is more interesting than most melodramas on several counts.

For one thing, there's the fact that the parents of this golden girl and boy aren't evil - irrational, opportunistic and unfair, maybe, but with understandable motivations and visible love for their offspring. That makes all four of them genuine participants in the drama, not just plot devices.

Then there's the twist that takes place in the second episode, after the D.A. comes down on Larry, and the furious businessman retaliates by sending one of his minions to dig up dirt on Roam. What the guy finds isn't exactly what Larry's looking for. It's better.

There's also real romance in the meeting and courting of Jewel and Adam, a dreamy-eyed teen infatuation reminiscent of those two crazy kids from Verona. Wilde is lovely and Cotrona looks like a young Keanu Reeves, which is not a bad way to look.

But, given the nature of Larry's business, Adam and Jewel's handsome hides aren't the only skin on display in "Skin."

A scene in this week's pilot features a bevy of barely dressed maidens parading across a long table-top with their maidenhood - I use the term loosely, of course - on display to a pair of gaping corporate customers.

On one hand, it's a pretty ridiculous scene, since these two seemingly worldly men are completely flummoxed by the sight of naked ladies and immediately sign a preposterous deal with Goldman.

On the other hand, I'm grateful for small favors. If it happened on HBO or Showtime, there's no way we'd be spared a closer look at all that maidenhood.

Short takes

  Fresh-faced Tony winner Marissa Jaret Winokur ("Hairspray") stars in "Beautiful Girl"
    
(7 tonight, repeated 9 tonight and 7 p.m. Monday, ABC Family), a lighter-than-air
     comedy-drama about a plus-sized music teacher who takes on the wonderful, horrible
     world of beauty pageants. Fran Drescher ("The Nanny") is her (mostly) supportive mom,
     Mark Consuelos ("All My Children") is her (mostly) adoring fiance and Deborah Gibson
     wrote Winokur's unfortunate songs. Despite references to eating disorders, self-esteem
     issues and - would I make this up? - the plight of Amish teens, it's two hours of pink,
     fluffy cotton candy.
 

  Chipping, the British schoolmaster of James Hilton's sentimental classic, has been
    famously portrayed by Robert Donat and Peter O'Toole (and, less famously, in a 1984
    English miniseries, by Roy Marsden of the Inspector Dalgliesh mysteries). Now Martin
    Clunes takes on the role in this "Masterpiece Theatre" version of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips"
   
(8 tonight, PBS) and makes it his.


    Viewers of the digital cable channel BBC America may recognize Clunes as the oafish anti-
    hero of "Men Behaving Badly." His transformation here into a sensitive teacher,
    love struck husband and late-blooming achieveris, in a small but satisfying way, what
    acting is all about.

  I can't imagine whom Comedy Central hopes to reach with "Kid Notorious" (9:30 p.m.
    Wednesday, repeated 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, Comedy Central), a new weekly cartoon
    based on the adventures of elderly movie mogul Robert Evans. Fans of Robert Evans?
    Friends of Robert Evans? Robert Evans?

    Insider-y but uninteresting, brazen but stubbornly stuck in antique stereotypes, this
    week's half-hour introduces Evans (voicing his own character, as well as serving as
    executive producer), butler English (Alan Selka, Evans' real-life English butler) and
    enormously fat, drearily "sassy" black maid Tollie Mae (Niecy Mash, "Reno 911!").

    The plot, about a hip-hop Broadway version of "The Godfather," gives Evans a chance to
    make a dozen nasty jokes about the gangsta scene and a dozen more about a rival play
    called "Sharon Stone's Vagina."

    When this sort of comedy flops, the people behind it always complain that they're just
    too, too politically incorrect for these cautious times. Somehow, the thought that they
    aren't funny doesn't seem to occur to them.

 
Intent on documenting their own act of terrorism, the Chechen separatists who took 700
     Russians hostage last October shot hours of videotape inside the theater where the act
     took place.  This remarkable footage forms the basis for "Terror in Moscow" (6 p.m.
     Thursday, HBO), a one-hour film of stunning impact. The three-day siege was
     extraordinary in many respects: the presence of 19 bomb-carrying women among the 41
     terrorists; the capricious, frequently bizarre behavior of the captors; and, most
     tragically, the fact that the bungling Russian authorities caused the death of 129
     hostages with the experimental gas used in the rescue.

    
This British-made film is out of the ordinary, too, not just for the Chechen footage but
     for the interviews with survivors, who describe their steep, swift descent into a
     totalitarian world in miniature.

E-mail: jweintraub@journalsentinel.com.

From the Oct. 19, 2003 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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