The creator of 'Skins,' a new MTV drama at the center of a raging controversy, has issued a statement about the show.

In an essay posted on MTV.com, Bryan Elsley said that the U.S. adaptation of the U.K. hit has not only made every effort to "abide by the law," he asserts that it's a show about "intensely moral" young people just trying to figure out life.

"Consequences do flow from incorrect or selfish behavior," Elsley wrote, "but in the show, these [consequences] are shown to be unexpected, hard to predict, and more to do with the loss of friendship than anything else, which in any context, is a disastrous outcome."

Who knows if the statement, which sounds as though it was designed to stop advertisers from fleeing the show, will end the controversy about the provacative content of 'Skins,' which MTV executives themselves apparently thought might edge into child-porn territory.

What Elsley doesn't appear to understand is that 'Skins,' along with several other recent U.K.-to-U.S. remakes, faces a whole host of problems. The fact that American television has trained viewers to expect characters to get comeuppances much sooner than the 'Skins' characters do -- well, that's just one of the issues faced by show.

Maybe Elsley thinks the loss of friends is a high enough price for the 'Skins' characters to pay. And maybe that's adequate punishment in the eyes of the show's younger audience members. But, rightly or wrongly, many adult viewers will look at 'Skins' and not see the teenagers face significant consequences from their behavior.

Let me be clear: I'm not saying the characters should or shouldn't be punished. I'm just saying that American cultural sensibilities, especially in the TV realm, generally demand that rule-breaking characters, especially younger ones, pay much bigger prices much sooner than the 'Skins' characters do. We've been trained to expect this to happen.

As David Carr wrote in the New York Times, "Even in the most scripted reality programming, the waterfall of poor personal choices is interrupted by comeuppance."

It's true. Most American shows, from the classiest cable dramas to the cheapest reality knockoffs, show people being taken down quite a few pegs after they do bad things.

'Mad Men,' for instance, has been the story of a man who pays and pays for his youthful mistakes and his adult lies. Much of the suspense over the endings of 'The Shield' and 'The Sopranos' stemmed from audiences wanting to see if the lead characters on those shows would face a serious reckonings after years of selfish choices. Is this a legacy of the Puritan streak in American culture? Wherever the desire sprang from, let's face it, some people really wanted to see Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey pay the ultimate price.

When it comes to teens, we generally expect those characters to learn life lessons and be reeled back from really bad decisions by caring adults or thoughtful friends. Maybe we're prepared to see Don Draper or Vic Mackey get away with murder for years and face the slow dissolutions of their families and their dreams, but generally speaking, television in America has treated teens differently.

Teenagers in American shows do go through crises, but these problems generally follow predictable paths and everyone learns from their experiences by the end of the hour. 'Friday Night Lights' and 'Everwood' are shows that have treated the complex problems of young people with intelligence and respect, but 'FNL' now airs on DirecTV and 'Everwood' is long gone. It's not like American television is clamoring for more shows like that, which were the exceptions to the usual rules.

Call it brave or call it culturally clueless, but 'Skins' seems to be pursuing a different path: Its characters generally get away with taking drugs, breaking curfew, having sex and doing all manner of other things that make parents extremely nervous, and parents, by the way, aren't around to impart life lessons or course correct.

Emotionally, sure, Elsley is right: The teens in the 'Skins' episodes I've seen sometimes pay prices for their risk-taking behavior. But I think American audiences are more likely to be distracted by the fact that these kids are breaking all kinds of rules and no one is stopping them or lecturing them, not even their friends. To see kids navigating life completely on their own, without at least a little moral guidance -- again, right or wrong, that's just not something that's common on American television. This is the culture that gave rise to the term "helicopter parenting," after all -- those kinds of scenarios just press our collective anxiety buttons.

The original 'Skins' caused controversy in England, but as someone who has lived England and who is married to an Englishman, I can also see why the program thrived there.

It strikes me that both 'Skins' and Showtime's 'Shameless,' another U.K. remake that has had a mixed reception here, have very British attitudes toward rebellion. English television audiences tend to like subversive characters who break the rules and give the middle finger to the richer, more educated classes. The class system in the U.K. isn't as rigid as it used to be, but it's left a cultural legacy -- a love of underdog characters who don't really care about the rules and care even less about getting ahead. Characters who stick it to the Man and have no real ambitions are common in the U.K. They're far less common in the generally aspirational fare we see in the U.S.

Just one example from the nerd realm: 'Star Trek' characters are supposed to abide by the Prime Directive and not interfere with other societies and cultures, whereas the lead character in the U.K.'s most popular sci-fi show, 'Doctor Who,' darts around through time and space to do pretty much whatever he wants, to whomever he wants. Tricksters, hucksters, rebels and drunks are celebrated on U.K. television. You can be a rebel on American television, as long as you're a rebel who fights crime and catches bad guys.

Sure, I'm overgeneralizing, but these cultural differences are real, and the TV creator who ignores them does so at his or her peril. In the case of 'Skins,' the problem for some American viewers might be the fact that misbehaving characters don't pay a big enough price quickly enough. The problem with 'Shameless,' on this side of the Atlantic anyway, may be that the characters don't aspire to, well, anything. We expect to get behind characters who want something -- better lives, more attractive mates, bigger houses. The characters on 'Shameless' are content being stuck where they are, and that's just not the norm on American TV.

I don't like to think of myself as the morality police, but truth be told, I struggled not to condemn Frank Gallagher of 'Shameless' when I saw him passed out on the kitchen floor (again) or spending the family's food money at a bar. I struggled not to be impatient as I watched Fiona not enroll in community college or otherwise try to climb the economic ladder. I'm not saying TV shows should only feature characters who have achieved something or want to achieve something with their lives. I'm saying that these characters appeared to be eerily comfortable with their lack of ambition and prosperity, just as the young 'Skins' characters are casual about rule-breaking and risk-taking. These attitudes are not frequently seen on American television, and thus they take some getting used to.

But are these shows worth getting used to? That's another question entirely.

Unfortunately, 'Skins,' 'Shameless' and another U.K. import, Syfy's 'Being Human,' are far too respectful of the U.K. shows that spawned them. They not only imported the cultural attitudes of the shows they were derived from, they also, in the cases of 'Skins' and 'Being Human,' offered up U.S. pilots that are mostly shot-for-shot remakes of the British pilots. There was a sad lack of imagination on display in both cases.

Never mind the condescending attitude of the Showtime comedy 'Episodes,' which condemns American remakes that don't pay sufficient homage to the British shows they're copying. 'Episodes' is dead wrong about that. Not adapting a show to its new environment is as big a mistake as simply dumbing a program down. Those are different kinds of mistakes, but they're both still mistakes.

The fact is, if you want to bring a show across the pond from the U.K., some things have to change. Attitudes, characters and situations have to speak to the audience of that country. If anything, the episodes I've seen of all three shows ('Skins,' 'Shameless' and 'Being Human') run into the same problems: They're holding on too hard to the British original. (And in the cases of 'Skins' and 'Being Human,' the casts aren't nearly as good as the casts of the original shows. The sensational ensemble of 'Shameless' is that show's saving grace.)

Come on, have we learned nothing from 'Skins'? Conformity is a trap. Rules are made to be broken.

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