Aligning Adolescents to the Public Sphere: The Teen SerialSkamand Democratic Aesthetic

From ‘secret’ online teen drama to international cult phenomenon: The global expansion of SKAM and its public service mission

“…The result was an online drama series that followed a cast of teenage characters at Hartvig Nissen High School in Oslo, as they navigate life at home and school. According to Andem, the concept used elements from television drama, sitcom and soap opera to tell its stories (quoted in Faldalen, 2016), thus combining a ‘complex TV’ narratology (Mittell, 2015) with humour and daily cliff-hangers (see Haastrup, 2018; Krüger and Rustad, 2019; Lindtner and Dahl, 2019 for analyses of SKAM ’s aesthetic strategies). Each season centres on a different main character told in the first person, which in turn helped the series to supply a range of possible identification positions and, furthermore, develop different main character stories across seasons (see also Jerslev, 2016; Sundet, 2017b): in season one, Eva (Lisa Teige) begins high school while feeling guilty about a lost friendship; she has to navigate new social hierarchies while wondering about her boyfriend Jonas’s (Marlon Langeland) commitment to her.…”

“…This article addresses the production, distribution and global expansion of SKAM at a time when television is increasingly distributed to national and international audiences to be consumed through both linear ‘flow’ and on-demand user modes. Although several studies have addressed the recent international success of Scandinavian prime-time television drama and the role of public service broadcasters (Bondebjerg and Redvall, 2015; Hansen and Waade, 2017; Jensen et al, 2016; Redvall, 2013; Sundet, 2017a), less has been written about the smaller online drama series that are also booming in the digitised Scandinavian television market (with exception, see Bengtsson et al, 2018; Krüger and Rustad, 2019; Lindtner and Dahl, 2019; Rustad, 2018). Many of these online series are produced within the same public service production culture and share the same ambition of ‘double storytelling’ (Redvall, 2013) as the more well-known Nordic noir series, though they target smaller and more distinct audience groups and use digital media and storytelling techniques to do so.…”

‘Youthification’ of drama through real-time storytelling: A production study of blank and the legacy of SKAM

“…For example, the analysis of blank exposed many constraints in the real-time production model, which requires the production team to write, produce and publish a storyline almost all at once in a way that is not particularly sustainable. These findings represent an important response to previous studies of real-time online drama -and SKAM in particular -which have tended to privilege the benefits of the format over its challenges and dilemmas (Andersen and Sundet, 2019;Bengtsson et al, 2018;Krüger and Rustad, 2019;Lindtner and Dahl, 2019;Sundet, 2020). Clearly, this format is not an easy path to success, even though SKAM made it look that way.…”

“…Many public service broadcasters echo this sentiment by stressing the necessity of following the audience onto new platforms to serve it (Moe, 2009). Previous studies on SKAM substantiate this imperative by focusing on how the show reflects teens' 'alwayson' reception mode in a media-saturated society (Duggan, 2020;Krüger and Rustad, 2019;Lindtner and Dahl, 2019;Sundet, 2020). Relatedly, one of the key selling points of the SKAM remakes was the original show's ability to transition audiences from linear to online viewing modes (Sundet, 2021).…”

From pleasure to politics: Five functions of watching TV-series for public connection

“…This interest could manifest privately (as it does in the interviews), but it may also take the form of collective interactions in non-political online spaces where political talk nonetheless emerges, conceptualized by Wright (2012) as ‘third space’. A recent and telling example of the latter (Lindtner and Dahl, 2019) is how the series ‘Skam’ engaged wide audiences in online discourse about a number of contentious issues. Affinitive motivation is thus also a function that highlights how engagement with fictional entertainment can contribute to what Dahlgren (2002) coins ‘Civic Affinity’ – a sense of belonging to communities that is centred on the same political questions and values.…”