This approach created a sense of anticipation and surprise, as it was never clear when new material might be coming. But as Skam shows, it also allows for the exact opposite: for a show to drip-feed a season over the course of a dozen weeks, in a super -incremental fashion. The Internet has made it possible to binge-watch an entire season in a single sitting.
Each week’s clips were broadcast together as a full episode on Friday on one of NRK’s regular TV channels. on a Monday, that’s when the scene became available. So if a sleepless, anxious Isak took an “Are You Gay?” test online at 3 a.m. Each week’s “episode” was divided into four to six clips of about five minutes each that would be uploaded to Skam’s website, without warning, at the exact time the events shown were happening over the course of the semester. It was easy to get invested in these characters because of the immersive way their stories unfolded. The final season follows Sana, a tough Muslim girl (and a fan favorite) dealing with insecurities about being a religious young woman from an immigrant background in a largely atheist country. Seasons 1 and 2 look at girls working through problems with their boyfriends and friends, while Season 3 centers on a boy named Isak who is struggling with his sexuality. Another factor that makes Skam stand out: During its four seasons, not a single straight, white male was ever the main protagonist. remake from MTV, Skam looks at a group of teenage friends from multiple perspectives, with each lead receiving a season-long focus while the stories of the others continue to develop in the background.
The series was also shot somewhat on the fly, only on real locations and not in studio interiors, with each episode filmed just a couple of weeks before it aired. Part of the show’s authenticity comes from its actors: They’re roughly the same age as their characters, have minimal performing experience, and wear little or no makeup to cover their youthful blemishes. Skam borrows and improves techniques that go back to the British teen series Skins and Girls, an earlier NRK series Andem made aimed at 12-year-olds.
Originally conceived as a web experiment aimed at young women of around 16, the show was envisioned as a modestly scaled series (Seasons 2 and 3 combined cost less than $1.2 million to make) about Norwegian teens, with the storylines inspired by Andem’s wide-ranging interviews with potential viewers. The brain behind Skam is the showrunner Julie Andem, who wrote and directed all 47 episodes.
As devoted fans mark the end of the show’s original run, many are wondering whether an English-language version of Skam will be able to capture the raw realities and unique production factors that made the original such a hit. and Canada, with production set to begin this summer. The series’ breakout success led the producer Simon Fuller, of American Idol fame, to buy the remake rights for the U.S. A rabid international following developed last year: Fan-run (and technically illegal) YouTube and Twitter accounts started uploading the scenes with homemade translations and subtitles, with some clips reaching views in the seven digits as word-of-mouth spread about Skam’s resonant warts-and-all portrayal of contemporary teenage life. Though Norway has just five million people, Season 2 and 3 respectively saw an average of one million and 800,000 viewers per episode on TV. The brief clips made the series easily shareable on social media and watchable on smartphones, paving the way for Skam’s success both at home and abroad. Viewers would get several short, documentary-like scenes that popped up unannounced on the show’s website in real time-whenever the events depicted in the series were supposedly happening. Though episodes eventually get packaged and shown on regular TV, Skam is a native web series. Skam’s appeal comes from its unusual commitment to realism-in terms of its subject matter, characters (who are mostly played by non-professional actors), and method of release. America’s Wildly Successful Socialist Experiment Tom McTague