As If (partially lost British teen drama series; 2001-2004)

Title card.

Status: Partially Lost

As If was a British teen drama series that aired on the premium channel E4 as one of its flagship programmes, and later aired on Channel 4. The show consisted of 76 episodes across 4 seasons, airing from January 2001 to July 2004.

The show concerned a group of 6 London youngsters navigating sex, drugs, and interpersonal relationships. It was noted for its to-camera narration; frenetic cinematography; and considerable usage of licensed popular music. As If maintained a cult following, and was critically acclaimed, with retrospectives highlighting the show's influence on later successful teen shows such as Skins and Sugar Rush.

Availability

As If never received any release on home media or streaming. This is believed to be due to the likely-extreme cost of licensing the show's considerable soundtrack for home release. However, unlike other Channel 4 shows that used licensed music such as Sugar Rush, the producers of As If refused to replace the soundtrack with royalty-free stock music for home media, instead preventing any release of the show at all. Speaking in a ten-years-on retrospective, many of the show's stars corroborated this reasoning for the show's lack of rerelease.

"Given the choice between no music so we can release the DVD, I'd choose the music," said Caroline Chikezie (Sasha). "They used to say the music was the seventh cast member, it was so important. It just took it to a whole new level. I guess it's worth not having a DVD release just to keep the music."

Despite the lack of official release, As If partially survives through third-party bootleg recordings of its original broadcast. However, there is no known accessible complete archive of the show.

For many years, the show was accessible on YouTube (albeit separated into 3 parts per episode due to contemporary length restrictions) via the channel of user courchevalskier, who uploaded every episode of the show to their channel in 2008. However, in the years since, many parts of many of these episodes have been stricken from YouTube due to music copyright claims, leading to large chunks of the series being entirely inaccessible. Other backups exist of complete episodes, and separate archives may be combined to complete a partial archive of the whole show, but to date, there is no public source of two episodes of As If in their complete forms.

The Missing Episodes

Season 2, episode 4 ('Alex's POV'); and Season 4, episode 15 ('Rob's POV') are not known to exist online in their complete forms. Sections of these episodes are available online via courchevalskier on YouTube, but the second part of each episode has been stricken from the channel. It is unknown if bootleg recordings of these episodes survive, and to date, they remain publicly unavailable online, meaning a complete archive of the show cannot exist.