In the world of Fox soaps, Skin is the steamy night that follows The O.C.’s equally hot day.
Bad things happen on the soon-to-return O.C., but even the worst calamities don’t dim the essential sunniness of this addictive summer pleasure. This is soap as teenage wish fulfillment; little is meant to register as real, and little does.

Skin is darker and deeper – and for adults, if not teens, it probably will prove more satisfying. Produced with their customary high-gloss sheen by Jerry Bruckheimer’s TV company, Skin traps a 21st-century Romeo and Juliet between two dirty worlds: politics and porn. Throw in race, religion and economic disparity, and you have enough problems to keep a soap busy for decades.

Still, it’s the pornography angle that has drawn the most attention, and that produces the most interesting character: a porn mogul played by the superb Ron Silver. Porn is only part of the show, but in an ever more competitive ratings environment, Skin is not above using its sexual setting or the sexual desires of its teenage characters as a drawing card.

Yet there’s nothing salacious or pornographic about the show itself, which by current standards is relatively chaste. Instead, the show uses its setting to contrast what we say we want in public with what we do in private, and it explores a business we generally pretend doesn’t exist. As Silver’s Larry Goldman says, “If the voters are so much against porn, why am I living in a 52,000-square-foot mansion?”

The Romeo of this story is Adam (D.J. Cotrona), the dreamy son of a Latina judge (Rachel Ticotin) and her very ambitious D.A. husband, Thomas Roam (Kevin Anderson). Juliet is Jewel (Olivia Wilde), the lovely daughter of Goldman and his wife (Pamela Gidley).

They meet and fall in love, but their timing couldn’t be worse. Up for re-election, Roam needs a hot-button issue, and he settles on Goldman.

And so the two families unite to keep their children apart. The twist is that the girl from the porn family has a loving home life, and the boy from the “good family” has parents who barely know he’s in the house.

Skin adds one more layer: a shady drug dealer played by Mod Squad’s Clarence Williams III. By the second episode, he, Goldman and Roam are locked in a complicated dance as each tries to destroy the other two.

The plot maze is amusingly complicated, and the fine cast wends its way through it with sure-footed conviction. As for the teen-targeted stars, Cotrona and Wilde make an almost impossibly attractive couple. Even when they lose their virginity, they remain pure.

Following the plot won’t be easy, but that’s the beauty of Skin. It’s lovely to look at, even when you’re not sure what’s going on underneath.