Skam received critical acclaim and significant recognition for its portrayal of sexual abuse in the second season and homosexuality in the third. The series was also praised for its contributions to promote Norwegian language and culture internationally, as well as for its unique distribution format, adopting a new strategy of real-time, high-engagement, snippet-based distribution rather than rigidity and television schedules. It received multiple Norwegian awards throughout its run, being honored for its dramatic narrative, innovative storytelling format, writing, directing, and actors' performances.
Norway and Nordic countries In Norway, on average, about 192,000 viewers watched the first season, with the first episode being one of the most viewed of all time on NRK TV online. In the first week of June 2016, streaming of
Skam was responsible for over half of the traffic on NRK TV. Following the release of the third-season finale, NRK stated that the second season had an average audience of 531,000, while the third season broke all streaming records on its NRK TV service with an average audience of 789,000 people. The trailer for the fourth season, released on 7 April 2017, was watched by 900,000 people within four days. During the start of the fourth season, 1.2 million unique users had visited
Skams website, and the first episode had been watched by 317,000 people. NRK P3 editorial chief Håkon Moslet told
Verdens Gang that "We see that there is high traffic and high interest for season 4. Since the end of the season we have seen a pattern around viewer interest. We lie high in the first week and towards the end of the season when the drama kicks in." In May 2017, NRK published a report on 2016 viewing statistics, writing that the third season broke both the streaming record for a series on NRK TV and for streaming of any series in Norway. An October 2016
Aftenposten report detailed that
Skam had become popular in Sweden, with "well over 5000" viewers with Swedish
IP addresses watching the episodes, not counting the individual clips. A later report from
Verdens Gang in January 2017 stated that
Skam had "broken all records" in Sweden, with over 25 million plays on SVT Play. Following the series' licensing deal for broadcasting in Denmark, the series broke records in January 2017, with the show's first episode scoring 560,000 viewers on DR TV. In Finland, the first episode had more than 130,000 views by the end of February 2017, two and half months after its release, described by Yle audience researcher Anne Hyvärilä as "quite exceptional".
Skam has received critical acclaim. The newspaper
NATT&DAG selected it as the best TV series of 2015. In its second season,
Kripos, Norway's National Criminal Investigation Service, praised the series' handling of
sexual abuse, including the girls' encouraging the victim, Noora, to go to the emergency room to explain the situation and gather evidence of the abuse, and Noora confronting her abuser with relevant laws he has broken to prevent the sharing of photographs showing her naked. The National Center for Prevention of Sexual Assault also praised the portrayal, adding that they wish for the series to become a syllabus in schools. In the third season, Martine Lunder Brenne of
Verdens Gang praised the theme of homosexuality and wrote that "I praise it first and foremost because young homosexual people, both in and outside the closet, finally get some long-awaited and modern role models. It doesn't matter if it's a character in a fictional drama – right now,
Skam is Norway's coolest show". In the fourth season, Christopher Pahle of
Dagbladet praised a conversation about religion, writing: "two young people, with Muslim backgrounds, have a reflected, respectful and enlightening conversation about religion without arguing or taking it to the trenches. Think about that. They pick flowers and dribble a ball, and even if they don't necessarily convince each other, that's not the purpose either. The point is that they understand each other".
Skam has been recognised for its contributions to promote Norwegian language and culture, and to foster affinity between Nordic countries. In December 2016,
the Nordic Association awarded
Skam the annual Nordic Language Prize for its ability to engage a young Nordic audience, connecting with young people across the Nordic region and fostering positive attitudes about the region's neighbouring languages. The show also led to popularisation of the word , which was noted by the
Norwegian Language Council in 2016 when it chose it as one of the
words of the year. In June 2017, just prior to the show's ending,
Aftenposten published a report featuring interviews with many well-known Norwegian television creators, writers and directors, all praising
Skam showrunner Julie Andem for her creative work on the show. Praise was directed at the series' "unpolished" nature, her ability to maintain "such a high level of quality over a long period of time", the series' blend of different sexualities and ethnicities and use of dialogue to resolve issues, and the show's compassion, thereby its ability to truly capture its generational audience. The show's series finale received positive reviews. Vilde Sagstad Imeland of
Verdens Gang praised the final clip for being a "worthy and emotional ending". Cecilie Asker of
Aftenposten wrote that "The very last episode of
Skam leaves us with a big sorrow, a sore loss, and a craving for more. It couldn't have been better." On 1 July 2017, during the celebration of
Oslo Pride,
Skam, its creator Julie Andem, and actors Tarjei Sandvik Moe, Henrik Holm and Carl Martin Eggesbø were awarded the "Fryd" award, an award given to persons or organizations that break the norms in gender and sexuality in a positive manner. In February 2018,
Prince William and
Catherine, the then-
Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and members of the
British royal family, visited the Hartvig Nissen school to meet with the cast and learn more about
Skam, its impact on the actors' lives and to discuss youth and mental health.
International success Starting with season three, the show attracted an international audience, and NRK was therefore heavily asked to add English subtitles to the
Skam episodes online. The requests were declined due to the license for the music presented throughout the series being restricted to a Norwegian audience, and that easy availability outside Norway would violate the terms of NRK's license agreements. An attorney for NRK elaborated that
YouTube videos featuring more than 50% original Skam content would be automatically removed. When denied official subtitling, fans started making their own translations of the episodes into several world languages, greatly expanding the online fanbase. Norwegian viewers were quick to share translated clips quickly after availability through
Google Drive, and also started blogs to cover additional material and language courses to explain Norwegian
slang. By the end of 2016,
Skam had been
trending globally several times on Twitter and Tumblr, and its Facebook, Instagram and Vine presence grew rapidly. Filming locations, including
Sagene Church, and the Hartvig Nissen school, were visited by fans, and the actors were receiving worldwide attention. Its social media popularity continued into its fourth season in April 2017, with over 20,000
tweets containing #skamseason4 registered in 24 hours at the time of season four's first clip, a substantial portion of which originated from the United States. In January 2017,
Skam was
geoblocked for foreign viewers. NRK attorney Kari Anne Lang-Ree stated that "NRK has a right to publish content to the Norwegian audience and foreign countries. The music industry is reacting to the fact that many international viewers are listening to music despite NRK not having international licensing deals. NRK takes the concerns from the music industry seriously. We are in dialogue with [the music industry] to find a solution". When the fourth season premiered in April, the geoblock was removed for Nordic countries. Anna Leszkiewicz of
New Statesman posted in March 2017 that she considered
Skam "the best show on TV", highlighting the second season's handling of
sexual assault. She praised the series for avoiding "shocking, gratuitous rape scenes", instead focusing on a single hand gesture by abuser Nico as a sign of predatory behavior. However, Leszkiewicz criticized the show for taking the "escape route", in which Noora finds the courage to speak to another girl who was at the party, who insists that, while Noora and Nico were in bed together, no sexual intercourse took place. Leszkiewicz commented that "So many women go through what Noora went through in
Skam. Most of them don't get offered the same escape route. Instead, they have to live with the shame and confusion of an 'ambiguous' assault." The same month,
Elite Dailys Dylan Kickham wrote that the international fanbase for
Skam on social media was "much larger than I ever would have predicted", with major fan groups on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. He credited the third season's storyline of homosexuality, calling it "incredibly intimate and profound", particularly praising a scene featuring a conversation about flamboyant attitudes between main character Isak and supporting character Eskild. While acknowledging highlights of the past two seasons, Kickham explained that "season three stands above the rest by shining a light on aspects of sexuality that are very rarely depicted in mainstream media", praising Eskild's "magnificent and timely take on the toxic 'masc-for-masc' discrimination within the gay community" in response to Isak's homophobic comments. "It's these small, incisive moments that show just how much
Skam understands and cares about the issues it portrays", explained Kickham. In March 2017, voters of
E! Online's poll regarding "Top Couple 2017" declared characters Isak and Even, main stars of the show's third season, the winners.
Verdens Gang wrote in April that
Skam had become popular in China, where publicly discussing homosexuality is illegal. It reported that almost four million Chinese people had watched the third season through
piracy and a total of six million had watched all episodes so far translated to Chinese. The report also stated that NRK has no plans to stop piracy in China, and NRK P3 editorial chief Håkon Moslet told
Verdens Gang that "It was Isak and Even that captured a young Chinese audience. There's a lot of censorship in China, and they are role models and have a relationship that Chinese people have a need to see." Anna Leszkiewicz wrote three more articles on
Skam and its impact between April and December 2017. In the first report, she credited the series for having tackled multiple difficult topics with the use of universal emotions like loneliness rather than issue-based strategies. Finally, in her last report, she focused on
Skams legacy as an
American adaption was in production. NRK P3 editorial chief Håkon Moslet told her that "There was a lot of piracy", acknowledging that the show's global popularity was the result of fans illegally distributing content through Google Drive, though adding "But we didn't mind". Producer and project manager Marianne Furevold explained that "We were given a lot of time to do so much research, and I think that's a huge part of the success that we see today with
Skam", referencing extensive in-depth interviews, attending schools and youth clubs, and immersing into teenagers' online lives, something that she did not think would have been possible with a commercial network. In regards to ending the series after its fourth season, while its popularity peaked, Moslet told Leszkiewicz that writer Julie Andem spent an enormous amount of time developing the series; "It was kind of an extreme sport to make, this series, especially for her. It was her life, 24/7, for two and a half years. It was enough, I think. And she wanted to end on a high. So that's the reason. I think it was the right thing". Andem had posted on Instagram that she "wouldn't have been able to make a season five as good as it deserved to be", though she had also written that she did not want to give away the producing job of the American version, opting to take on the responsibility of that adaptation. That decision itself disgruntled fans, who "found her decision to leave the Norwegian series just to take on another huge commitment with the American show disappointing". Moslet praised the series' diverse set of characters, concluding with the statement that "At a time of confusion and intolerance, it seems more important than ever" for content creators to embrace diversity and reject intolerant attitudes. In December 2017, Tumblr released its list of the most talked-about shows of the year on its platform, with
Skam topping the chart as number one, outranking hugely successful American series, such as
Game of Thrones,
Stranger Things, and
The Walking Dead.
Scholarship SKAM has been the subject of numerous academic studies.
Vilde Schanke Sundet argues that the real-time quality of shows like SKAM help broadcasters to reconnect with younger audiences, and has examined viewers motives for engaging with the community online. Other scholars, such as
Tore Rye Andersen and
Sara Tanderup Linkis, analyse the narrative effect of what Ruth Page calls "real-time narration", while
Jill Walker Rettberg analysed the use of social media narrative to include the viewer in a "we-narrative", a collective
narration that emphasises the group above the individual.
Awards and nominations == Other media ==