When Julie Andem was asked to bring teenagers to NRK (essentially Norway’s version of the BBC) she couldn’t have foreseen how successful she’d be. After NRK allowed her to spend six months pre-production interviewing young Norwegians, Andem made Skam, a high school drama set in Oslo. Meaning “shame”, Skam was praised for its realism: plots reflected the genuine problems of Norwegian youth, and Andem cast real teenagers to play its characters.
It collapsed the boundaries between life and fiction with a ground-breaking release strategy (short “clips” were released on NRK’s website as though live – so scenes set at 10:37am on Tuesday aired at 10:37am on Tuesday) and immersive extra materials (between these clips, screenshots of characters’ instant messages would appear on the site, and viewers could also follow the lives of characters through real Instagram accounts run by the actors).
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