Bryan Elsley gives difficult teenagers dialogue that makes them funny and worth caring about. We value that sympathy, though Skins also exposes his weakness for familiar plots and provocation that has outlasted its interest.
Fi1m perspective
The Bristol A-level students in Skins (2007) do not have to behave well to hold our attention. Bryan Elsley and co-creator Jamie Brittain follow them through college and parties, allowing sex and drugs into their lives without making disapproval the programme's main business. We warmed to them because the dialogue and performances made these teenagers worth caring about even when their next difficulty was easy to predict. That is a sound reason to keep watching, if the noise suits the evening.
Elsley's breakthrough as a television writer came with the adaptation The Crow Road (1996), before Skins made the teenage ensemble central to his work. On Skins, he and Brittain brought young writers into the process rather than relying solely on adults to reconstruct adolescence. That choice matters: the characters have their own ideas about right and wrong, however unhelpful those ideas may be to everyone around them. The writing is strongest when it lets us understand those rules without requiring us to approve.
The trouble is that sympathy does not make the plotting less familiar. Skins can send teenagers who already seem drawn from a stock list towards difficulties we recognise too quickly, then rely on the cast to make the journey matter. Its appetite for sex and drugs becomes tiring when their presence is treated as enough reason to watch. Elsley and Brittain give the performers lively dialogue, but too often leave them to supply the surprise themselves.
Later work changes the settings and the size of the encounters. Elsley created and wrote Dates (2013), a series of actor-led half-hour films about first dates, and Kiss Me First (2018), an adaptation blending live action with virtual-reality elements. The stripped-back drama of Dates gives actors and their exchanges more of the space. But Skins is where we can most firmly recommend his writing, provided its abrasive teenage company appeals. Start there for the dialogue, and allow the actors to carry some predictable plotting.
Biography
Bryan Elsley is a Scottish television writer. He was born on 17 May 1961 in Dalkeith and studied English and History at the University of York, where he collaborated with Harry Enfield on a comedy duo that performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Elsley is best known as co-creator, with his son Jamie Brittain, of the E4 teen drama series Skins (2007–2013). Other credits include the BBC adaptation of Iain Banks's The Crow Road (1996), Rose and Maloney (2002–2005), Dates (2013) and Kiss Me First (2018). In 2025 the BBC commissioned his series Counsels.
