The first installment of the teen drama “SKAM Austin” popped up on Facebook almost without warning, on April 24th, at 3:40 P.M. Central Standard Time. No advertising preceded it. No interviews with the actors or the director accompanied its début, and the clip had no production credits. It was as if the footage were just another update in your Facebook feed. The show—an American version of the Norwegian phenomenon “SKAM,” whose title means “shame”—did not take the form of conventional episodes. Viewers were instead offered an array of scenes, of varying lengths, shot in and around a high school in Texas’s capital. One clip was two minutes long; another was eight. These fragments began sporadically “dropping” on Facebook Watch, the social network’s entertainment portal, in accordance with the action of the show. If a couple got into a fight in school at 12:40 P.M. on a Monday, the clip showed up on the platform at exactly that time, creating the uncanny impression that you were watching something that was actually happening. If the producers posted a clip showing a student getting dressed for a party on a Saturday night, many young viewers would be doing the same thing.

The substance of the show wasn’t that different from “Riverdale”: it offered the usual roundelay of broken hearts, bruised feelings, and hookups. Teens kissed. They zoned out in class. They shared earbuds. But “SKAM Austin” had many hidden layers, and the producers wanted viewers to uncover them all. The characters, some of them played by local teen-agers, all had Instagram accounts, and, like real people’s, the posts offered insights into the characters’ pasts and their hopes for the future. Collectively, the video clips, photographs, and comments imbued the characters with a depth that not even flashbacks provide in conventional TV.

Soon after the first, six-minute clip of “SKAM” appeared on Facebook Watch, I developed a theory about several of the characters: long before April 24th, it seemed, Megan, a member of the school’s dance troupe, had stolen a boy named Marlon from her friend Abby, another dancer; Abby, in revenge, had shut Megan out of her life, and as a result Megan had quit the troupe. The only hint that the clip itself had offered about the girls’ relationship was a moment of Megan’s gaze lingering on Abby as she swept by with the other dancers. To decode the implications of this split-second image, I needed to do what we often do these days after meeting interesting strangers at a party: I scoured the characters’ social-media accounts. “SKAM” is a kind of detective show, rewarding the viewer who is a skilled online stalker.

Scrutiny of Abby’s Instagram posts suggested that she had scrubbed her account of traces of her friendship with Megan. But, as often happens with actual teen-agers, she had been inexpert in rewriting her history, forgetting to delete a video. It showed the two girls happily taking on the “mannequin challenge”—recording themselves suddenly freezing up and holding a tricky pose. Culturally attuned viewers would recall that such videos became a viral sensation at the end of 2016. This meant that the rupture had occurred sometime after that date.

As with all Internet products, once you establish a connection to “SKAM” it’s very hard to sever it. Facebook and Instagram send viewers constant reminders to log back in and stay up to date: “abby_taffy just posted a photo”; “SKAM Austin posted a new episode on Facebook Watch.” (These messages appeared on my phone’s lock screen next to announcements of my daughter’s Instagram posts about our family’s puppy.) The notices help viewers keep abreast of the basic story, but to get maximum pleasure from “SKAM” you must constantly burrow into the latest Instagram Stories or screenshots of texts. Internet viewing is always as much about what everyone else is watching and thinking as about what you’re watching and thinking—scholars talk about the medium’s “emotional contagion.” And “SKAM” is addictive in precisely the same way that social media can be addictive. If you miss out on too many details, you’ll feel as if you’d been demoted to sitting alone in the school cafeteria.

The fictional social media of “SKAM Austin” soon generated real social media—fervid discussion on everything from Tumblr to Twitter. For an obsessed viewer, there’s no limit to the amount of time that can be spent on “SKAM Austin” fan pages. The Internet, by leaving you feeling uniquely alone, paradoxically encourages human interaction. Megan and Marlon immediately became the cynosure of legions of online commenters, many of whom assessed the couple as if they were real. One poster wrote, “Not to get too deep and personal here, but I had an exchange with a friend who also happens to be an ex, and it made me think of Marlon and Meg, and I hadn’t realized it until today. It might be why I have such red flags about them.” She asked if anyone else felt the same way. Soon afterward, another poster wrote, “Relaaaaaaaaaaate.”

Conventional TV is a one-way street: you sit in front of a screen and watch an episode. Just as you must be static in order to finish watching it, the program itself is static: it had to be written, filmed, and edited to a conventional length. It represents a producer’s best guess about what will interest you (and, when there are commercials, an advertiser’s best guess about what viewers like you will buy). The model proved stable for more than fifty years, but it has crumbled in the age of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. According to a recent Nielsen report, millennials spend twenty-seven per cent less time watching TV programs (including streaming ones) than do older viewers. Every day, YouTube has an average of five billion views, more than a billion of them from mobile devices. The average teen-ager spends almost nine hours a day consuming media online, and sends or receives more than a hundred text messages.

There is a clear creative opportunity in this shift away from the network model. What if all these seemingly disparate activities and digital platforms could be marshalled into a single narrative—a Gesamtkunstwerk for the Internet age? Would it make the old-fashioned television episode seem as antique as black-and-white TV did once color sets appeared? The time seems right for an experiment like “SKAM.” In an era of short attention spans, it can seem atavistic to watch a half-hour series, let alone binge-watch it. “Engagement” is the key metric for the online industry—advertisers want to pay for how often you like, post, and click, rather than for how long you passively watch—and “SKAM,” with its cliffhangers and its multiple entry points, is designed to inspire passionate engagement. Fidji Simo, the head of Facebook Watch, told me, “ ‘SKAM’ was just the perfect fit for the kind of content we wanted to do more of.” Indeed, Facebook, which has been losing young users to YouTube and Snapchat, needs such programming to attract them. And what better way to advertise Facebook than by creating a show in which all the characters use Facebook?