I felt that the series really came of age in this instalment. I found the last one cliche and try-hard, and yes, there are heavy elements of the same in the second series - the family gets even more unrealistic, with the brother trying on women's clothes while the parents try on new sexual partners. However, towards the end of the series, after episode six, where Kim gets out of hospital, the main characters, Kim, Sugar, and Kim's new girlfriend Saint - the series is almost wholly about their relationship - seem to have grown up a lot.
The escapism of the stories is still cheaply presented; I'll say it again, if you have unrealistic drama, it cannot be portrayed with the realist camera angles and so forth that this show seems to favour. But by the end the characters were certainly adults; they're all thinking about moving in together, and they're all involved with older people. It's 12-18 months after the end of the last series, which means Kim and Sugar are staring down the barrel of their seventeenth birthdays. The themes are more mature than that though. We learn a lot about the dynamics of relationships in the later episodes - how to cope with 'bed death', the nature of love ... I really related to the final episodes where they discuss moving in together and Kim narrates how the big decisions are made on a whim or on the toss of a coin. The onset of adulthood is speedy because both Saint and Sugar's boyfriend Mark are something like twenty-three - they've both powered through university and are essentially able to provide the teenagers with board.
Sugar is a much more complex character in this series. She has been to prison and been stripped of much of the aura she had in the first series; now she's the desperate, jealous one. She's a faithful representation of chavvy people; she's got emotions, but she hides them by being vindictive or whatever. You hate her all the way, but you've got to admire her gall. She's still an incorrigible slut, though, buggering about with provincial gangsters all the time.
Kim is wholly lovable and grown-up; while I wish she developed more in the realm of family values, I'm not sure her family is intended to be functional. She is occasionally whiny and clingy, but this is usually presented sympathetically.
Saint is a very aloof, independent person. In my review of the first series I mentioned that Sugar should have been more ethereal and I think Saint fulfils this paradigm quite well, particularly in the first five episodes. I almost wish the series were longer so that the start of the relationship with this ephemeral quality could be extended.
I was heartened by the fact that, like me, the characters don't seem to have any hobbies, but they're still quite functional. The central characters are largely realistic portrayals, though lots of things seem to happen to them and there's absolutely no indication that some parts of life are boring or that money doesn't grow on trees.
It was clearly set up for a third series, with the pregnancy of Kim's mother and Sugar's flat blowing up and her having to come and live in a menage a trois with Kim and Saint. The menage a trois is an interesting concept, but I feel that a third series would have gone stale even if the programme hadn't been axed. In essence, Kim has the kind of formative sexual attraction to Sugar that Freud would have jizzed over, and she can't shake it. But she's also well in love with Saint and so Sugar's been a homewrecker all series, but in a really half-hearted way. I really think that Kim's dilemma of choice had been painfully laboured all through both series and that more of the same would in fact backfire and make you want to peel off your own face.
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