Skam: the Norwegian hit that could take US TV into uncharted territory

To be renamed Shame in the US, this gritty high school drama has developed an intense following for its frank and realistically flawed view of teenage life. 

by  Lanre Bakare
The combination of teenagers, violence, drugs and premarital sex has always been enough to push American audiences over the edge. From the moral panic surrounding A Clockwork Orange to Larry Clark’s Kids in the mid-90s and Girls in the last decade, stories of young people being “out of control” have intrigued and dismayed censors and the general public for decades.

Now Norwegian web-drama Skam is about to enter the arena of teen tales that may produce palpitations, with the remake set to hit US screens (renamed Shame) via American Idol producer Simon Fuller. On the face of it, Skam seems like an obvious investment for someone who has made his money from backing largely youth-driven successes that others didn’t see coming. It’s the latest Nordic TV hit (which thankfully can’t have “noir” attached to it), a show which one-fifth of Norway’s population watched weekly. It cleverly gave its characters real-life Instagram accounts, and garnered a following so committed to getting the message out that fans translated the show for English speakers themselves and hounded journalists to write about it.

The show’s episodes, which range from 20 to 50 minutes, slowly reveal the world of a group of 16-year-olds in an Oslo high school, with clips posted at the time of day the events are supposed to be happening. It’s already three seasons deep (all are available online via NRK’s site), with each series focusing on a particular teenager from a group of makeshift friends. Eva, the protagonist of season one, has doubts about her boyfriend Jonas’s commitment to her; in season two Noora deals with her feelings for hard-to-read alpha male William; and in season three Isak comes to terms with his own sexuality. It may not sound that revolutionary, but it’s the frankness and calmness with which these subjects are dealt with that make Skam something special.

Aesthetically it’s beautiful, with vistas of Norway that would turn an editor of Cabin Porn pine green with envy. But beneath the Kanken backpacks, the grassroots marketing and the perfectly helixed beanie hats, there is a drama that’s hard-hitting without ever feeling like it’s falling over itself to deal with “issues”. There isn’t the same contrived controversy that came with Skins or “voice of a generation” baggage that followed Girls around. Its closest relative is probably Australian series Heartbreak High, which presented a gritty but humorous look at life in a Sydney high school in the mid-90s. Like that show, the home lives of the students are just as important as the life lessons dished out in the schoolyard, with absentee parents getting as much flak as the kids on screen.

It’s refreshing to watch a show about teenagers where the protagonists aren’t self-obsessed cliches.

There are certain tropes: Vilde is the naive, socially awkward striver, for example, but mostly the characters are realistically flawed young people dealing with growing up. When issues do arise, they’re often punctured before they’re allowed to approach anything resembling a moral lesson, as when a teen pregnancy storyline is suddenly hijacked by the school nurse, whose bleak jokes about menstruation could come straight from a Sarah Silverman routine.

Vilde’s constant foot-in-mouth comments around Sana, a confident, nonchalant Muslim girl, are treated as low-hanging fruit, with Sana knocking back cliche after cliche about how Muslims are perceived by some in Norway rather than descending into a pit of despair. Likewise, Isak’s story begins as one we think we’ve seen before, the best friend of the confident kid (in this case, Jonas), who might finally find his feet. But that trope is destroyed by the end of the first season when it becomes clear something else is going on. Subtle hints are dropped about storylines throughout, but with so much to keep an eye on, it’d be hard for a sub-Reddit plot predictor to call most of these twists.

The challenge for the US version will be how to translate that nuance and feel for an American audience. This year has seen shows which have shifted the needle when it comes to refreshing presentations of young American life. Insecure and Atlanta are obvious candidates for television that, like Skam, garnered huge online followings, and did so by creating worlds that related to people on their terms. It can be done, but the success of those shows was built around studios ceding power to young people; those who innately understood their reality and reproduced it, rather than left it down to the diluting influence of a traditional writers’ room. If Shame can do that when it hits screens in the US, Simon Fuller could have another huge hit on his hands – one that takes TV into new, uncharted territory.