Now Streaming in Austin: SKAM Austin

Welcome to Now Streaming in Austin, highlighting locally made titles to watch while self-quarantining. When Facebook was looking for a city in which to set their first American reboot of the hugely successful Norwegian series SKAM, of course they came to Austin.

Where most series treat social media like it's a burden to be kicked out of the plot, there's no broken cell phone service here. Instead, SKAM Austin leaned heavily into how teens use their accounts, both as part of the storytelling and how audiences consumed it. Stories would have "daily drops," with snippets that would tie in with all the characters' Facebook and Instagram accounts. Someone gets dumped? You can bet their mentions will be blowing up. They snag the perfect selfie? They did it for the 'gram.

Of course, with two seasons completed it's hard to absorb all those drops and then reconstruct the timelines of fictional high schoolers in real time, but luckily Facebook edited every week's worth of episodes into easy-to-consume compilations to bring the whole story of the Bouldin High seniors together.

So why SKAM Austin? Because there's also a SKAM España, SKAM NL, SKAM France, and SKAM Italia, plus wtFOCK in Belgium and DRUCK in Germany. The whole point of all these versions was that it was never supposed to be a simple adaptation, but to bring the basic structure to different locations, but retain local authenticity. For all the similarities, the differences are what define these shows – and make it oh-so-familiar for local audiences. For more on the Austin version, read our interview with Facebook head of global creative strategy Ricky Van Veen here.

SKAM

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