That’s exactly how it went down, at least according to Erlend, a scruffy 25-year-old who works in the Norwegian music industry. He lives in Oslo, a.k.a. the birthplace of Skam, a ridiculously popular coming-of-age drama series that depicts the lives of fictional local teenagers. Even though it’s only been around since 2015, Skam, which is produced by NRK, a government-owned public broadcaster, and the biggest media company in Norway, is one of the most adored programs in the nation’s history, with about a quarter of the four million-person population watching each clip. It might also be one of the best TV shows about high school ever made.

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Skam, which means “shame” in Norwegian, is released in real-time, with zero warning. If a scene takes place at school on a Tuesday afternoon, the clip goes up on the show’s website Tuesday afternoon. If it takes place at one in the morning at a Saturday night house party, like the first scene of the third season, which Erlend and his friends watched together last year, then it’s uploaded on a Saturday night. At week’s end, the clips, which vary in length but are rarely longer than 15 minutes, are rolled into a single “episode,” which airs on television. For now, if you live outside Scandinavia, the only way to watch Skam is illegally, via fan blogs who upload the episodes, usually to Google Drive or YouTube, and write their own subtitles. In other words: they’re doing God’s work.

Every season of Skam follows a different student at Hartvig Nissen, a real public school in Oslo, where a few of the show’s main actors are actively enrolled. The first season tracks Eva, a nervous, big-hearted 16-year-old who starts high school on the outs from her old clique. Noora, a headstrong feminist who strikes up an unlikely romance with an older, brawl-starting ladies’ man named William, is at the center of Season 2. Season 3, which aired in the final months of 2016, is all about Isak, a baby-faced teen coming to terms with his sexuality. The fourth season, which began airing the second week of April, is about Sana, a Muslim teen who always speaks her mind. The day the trailer dropped, it was announced on Instagram that Sana’s season would be the show’s final one.

Though it’s entirely scripted, Skam is good at blurring the lines between drama and reality. The characters (not the actors) have their own Instagram accounts, which are updated in time with the events of the show, and their fictional text messages, written by 27-year-old web producer Mari Magnus, are posted on the Skam site between clips. Sometimes a short conversation between two characters can stir up more suspense for viewers than a whole episode. The Skam team — headed up by director, screenwriter, and all-around mastermind Julie Andem, 34 — doesn’t allow the cast to do interviews often, partly because they are actually very young, but also because they want to safeguard the show’s tightly wound universe, to preserve the illusion that these characters could almost be real.

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Andem, who declined to be interviewed for this piece, doesn’t do very much press either, especially outside of Scandinavia. This strategy has created an uncommonly intense relationship between the show and its audience. Fans invest in the characters' lives as if they were their friends, refreshing frantically, waiting for a clip or a text message as if their own life depended on it. Soap operas have long provided people around the world an escape from everyday traumas. Skam is helping people cope in a new way, by making the real world a more exciting place to be. Of course it’s all just pretend, but sometimes you need to make believe if you want to feel something real.



