Get the party started. With the CW’s 90210 remake and a new season of Gossip Girl right around the Labor Day corner, TV’s fountain of frisky youth is overflowing with buzz. Getting a jump on the competition this month: a sophomore year for ABC Family’s cutesy, chirpy GREEK and, more than earning its viewer discretion warning, BBC America’s shockingly bawdy teen romp Skins.

Skins goes places that would make even those jaded Gossip Girl brats blush. Think a British “Superbad,” or a debauched “Ferris Bueller” clone, to get the flavor of this gritty, anarchic, proudly profane and desperately funny study of public-school buds who often sound like they took vocabulary lessons from South Park. (My screeners include subtitles for when the raunchy dialogue flies by too fast.)

The ringleader of this group’s mischievous misadventures is 17-year-old Tony (Nicholas Hoult, the former child star of “About a Boy”), an effortless charmer who sings like an angel at choir tryouts but off-campus is hell-bent on hedonistic pleasure. His multicultural gang includes a Muslim, a tap-dancing gay kid and a sad sack named Sid, whose efforts to score girls or drugs go wildly askew.

While Sid naturally pines for Tony’s foxy girlfriend, he ends up bonding with the damaged Cassie, freshly sprung from eating-disorder rehab and more than a bit lost. Switching gears from outrageous and harrowing farce to aching poignancy, the unsentimental and unapologetic Skins never feels less than real.

Which makes these grungy kids, accents aside, unlikely ever to pass muster with the shiny sorority sisters and buff frat brothers who populate GREEK’s mythical Cyprus-Rhodes Fantasy U of not-so-hard knocks. Frothy as a head of light beer, GREEK is a sweet-natured but instantly forgettable comedic soap where even potential outsiders like a brainy nerd and an African-American gay guy can become pledges with only minor bumps to test their friendship.

The second season picks up after an eventful spring-break blowout in Myrtle Beach—yes, even on ABC Family, kids like to party—with Greek Week competitions exposing various inter-house rivalries and romantic triangles. It’s all played very light, with quippy dialogue on the order of “Step away from the kneecap, Tonya Harding.”

Setting the likably breezy tone is Spencer Grammer (daughter of Kelsey) as Casey, the interim Zeta Beta Zeta pres who’s still torn between two leaders of rival houses: preppy Evan (Jake McDorman) and slacker Cappie (Scott Michael Foster). Each guy is involved with new ZBZ squeezes who are, naturally, thorns in Casey’s side. Awfully pretty thorns, though.

Haven’t we been through all of this before with Brenda and Kelly and Dylan? That’s the point. Shows like GREEK, and the upcoming (and as-yet-unseen) 90210, are meant as glossy and yummy comfort food. I can’t help it if my inner delinquent is more intrigued by the messy, uncomfortable and unpredictable world of Skins.

greek Season premiere: Tuesday, 8/26, 9/8c, ABC Family (also online via video.tvguide.com)

Skins Sundays, 10/9c, BBC America (also online via video.tvguide.com)