Stream It Or Skip It: ‘In My Skin’ On Hulu, Where A Teen Navigates High School Angst While Hiding Her Mom’s Bipolar Disorder

Just when you think you’ve seen every cliche in a particular genre, a show comes along that gives a fresh perspective. The coming-of-age drama or comedy seems to follow a bunch of standard rules, including parents that barely have individual personalities. The British comedy In My Skin changes up that formula, with its main character dealing with the usual high school difficulties while managing a very tough situation at home and making sure everyone at school thinks things are just fine.

IN MY SKIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see dreamy shots of a bird flying into a room with flowy white curtains and a beautiful woman waiting to hold it. The voice over is a poem about that bird.

The Gist: We then switch to Bethan Gwyndaf (Gabrielle Creevy), who’s watching as her English teacher Ms. Morgan (Alexandria Riley) reads her poetry submission for the school’s literary magazine. Ms. Morgan definitely thinks Bethan can do better, and write something gritter and more personal.

That’s just one of the “high school big” issues that 16-year-old Bethan has to deal with. She’s not popular, but hangs out all the time with her two best friends, Travis (James Wilbraham) and Lydia (Poppy Lee Friar). As far as they’re concerned, Bethan has got the same issues that they have, like fellow teens that bully her, friends who have migrated to popular cliques, and parents who just don’t get her. And Bethan has managed to snow them, making up things about her life to make it look typical.

But when we follow Behan home, we see the real story: Her no-good father Dilwyn (Rhodri Meilir) informs Bethan that her mother is outside in the street. In fact, Katrina Gwyndaf (Jo Hartley) is in the middle of a manic episode, obsessively washing her car late at night and yelling at the neighbors. Bethan, knowing that her mother’s bipolar disorder is at a low point, takes her to the same mental health facility that she stayed at during her last low point. She’s admitted, but not before dancing with the nurse on-duty.

The next day she goes back to school like nothing happened. She even fakes a note from her mother that she shows to Travis and Lydia. She tries a grittier poem, but Ms. Morgan wants it to be more applicable to her life. Then in gym class, she gets her period and bleeds down the climbing rope, to her obvious embarrassment. She doesn’t want to let her buddies know that she’s dipping into a fruit and vegetable stand to get her mother some things for her stay at the facility.

On the way to visiting her mom Trina, she encounters her a-hole father, “the maddest bastard you will ever meet,” hanging out with his a-hole buddies; he approaches her like he’s going to threaten her, then just tells her to get some chips. Trina, for her part, is so paranoid, that she violently tosses the drink Bethan offers her against the wall and rants about how everyone is watching her every move and not everyone there is a medical professional. Bethan has to watch her mother get restrained by the nurses and orderlies. But she visits before school the next morning to see that her mother is calmer but not much better (and she learns a lot about Charlotte Church by another patient in a blue tuxedo).

Back at school, she finds out that the latest poem she submitted has been accepted for the literary magazine, and Ms. Morgan sends it out in an email to all the students. It’s raw and gritty, about her mom but not enough about her to make people suspect something’s amiss. The poem is so good it attracts the attention of Poppy (Leilah Hughes in the first episode, Zadeiah Campbell-Davies in the other four), the most popular girl in the class.

Our Take: It’s easy to think of In My Skin, written by Kayleigh Llewellyn and airing on BBC Three in 2018, as a coming-of-age story. But that’s an overly simplistic view of the series, which layers in the typical high school mishegas with a darkly comedic and often very dramatic story of a girl whose home life is anything but typical.

We have on the family side a mother who is in the middle of a mental break, a father who doesn’t have many shits to give about it, and Bethan trying to hold things together on her own. On the school side is typical school stuff: Fostering a burgeoning friendship with a popular girl while maintaining her current friendships, academics, gym class, dealing with jerky classmates. But in between the two sides is Bethan’s lies, which is what will really tie the five-episode season together.

What we’re intrigued by is how Bethan can so effectively compartmentalize her life, and how tough it’s going to be as she tends to Trina while making her name known to her classmates. Something will have to give at some point, and that’s where the comedy and drama will combine the most effectively.

The fact that she’s gotten this far begs for an episode that consists of a flashback to when she was in grade school or middle school, to see where these lies started. Alas, we don’t think we’ll get that. But, Creevy’s alternately confident and concerned performance more than makes up for the lack of backstory.

We’re especially happy to see Jo Hartley, a veteran of British comedies, get a meaty role here as Trina. She plays the extremes of bipolar disorder as the discomfiting reality it is. It’s not that she’s not aware of what she’s doing, but she also has no way to stop herself. If you’ve seen Kanye West’s recent tweets and presidential rallies, you know that this what manic episodes can look like, and Hartley plays hers to the letter.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After her friends read the poem, Bethan looks serious for a moment, then jokes that Ms. Hughes “eats that up” and laughs, then looks at the camera to acknowledge that we know the truth.

Sleeper Star: This is a tie between Friar as the daring, outspoken Lydia and Wilbraham as the sweet, caring Travis. As things shift in Bethan’s life, we’re looking forward to seeing how each of them reacts.

Most Pilot-y Line: Bethan’s battle with the fruit stand owner who hates “every teen turd who comes in here and tries to rob off me” is a bit long and slows down the episode’s pace a bit.

Our Call: STREAM IT. In My Skin provides some extra substance to the typical coming-of-age story, couched in mental illness and the desire of most teens to just fit in, even if they have to go to extreme measures to accomplish that goal.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream In My Skin On Hulu