Facebook has ordered an American remake of a viral Norwegian webseries for its new Watch streaming platform.
The original show, Skam (which translates to “Shame” in English), ran for four seasons as a webseries produced by Norway’s public broadcasting network, NRK. It’s a teen drama that got critical acclaim for tackling social issues like homophobia, sexual assault, and mental illness. It’s scripted (as in, not-reality), but the visuals seem a lot like your favorite lifestyle Instagrammer’s content: great light and loud accessories. The show follows a different teen character every season and takes place in one of Oslo’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
From the trailer, it sort of looks like if Gossip Girl put on a flower crown and had met a living teen before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W_kw99jQ5M
Skam made a name for itself in part because if its innovative release strategy. The show would roll-out new content nearly every day and then repackage those same clips into a more traditional episode later on. Back in June, the Atlantic’s Boyd Van Hoeij credited the strategy as streaming TV’s first compelling alternative to binge-watching: “The Internet has made it possible to binge-watch an entire season in a single sitting. 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. This approach created a sense of anticipation and surprise, as it was never clear when new material might be coming.”
The show was super popular in Norway, and it slowly developed an international fanbase through Tumblr. NRK reportedly geo-blocked its web player after the series blew up, though, and the series ended in January with “the vague promise of an English-language remake.” So whenever this reboot becomes available, there’s already an active fanbase who’s been waiting for access for quite some time now.
Facebook Watch launched in August ,and currently houses original programming from creators who have proven to do well on the social network, like Humans of New York: The Series. In September, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook would spend up to $1 billion on original content for the platform in 2018.