Comment # 8 on bug 1188862 from Dr. Werner Fink

(In reply to Adam Majer from comment #7)
> 1. mc prefers Slang over ncurses, though there is an option to use ncurses
> too
> 
> 2. The COLORTERM is to *force* color mode. It works just fine to detect
> color without this hack. I think it should be removed.

OK ... I guess that using some of the skins require more than having 8 colors. 
Therefore the new approach with e.g.

 cat files/usr/etc/profile.d/term.sh
 #
 # Midnight Commander needs this to run in color mode
 #
 if test "$(tput colors 2>/dev/null || echo 0)" -gt 8; then
     COLORTERM=truecolor
     export COLORTERM
 fi

and similar for tcsh should do the job.