The teenage TV series Skam – a Norwegian melodrama with international appeal
Submitted by:
Dag Skarstein
Abstract:
Quite mysteriously, a TV and online-series has become Norway’s biggest international drama success since Ibsen’s realistic plays. In spite of dialogs in Norwegian, with no available subtitles, the TV series Skam (Shame) has reached and touched a global teenage audience from all parts of the world; Italy, Russia, Mexico, Philippines, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Angola and many more. How can such an unexpected success be explained, and do the explanations concern the L1-subject?
This presentation will address two possible explanations for the series’ global success. First it will focus on the innovative online distribution without traditional marketing. Instead, the series has been distributed by young viewers through social medias and thus created a ‘secret room’ hidden from adult interference. Skam is launched not in episodes but in short clips, where each has a cliffhanger. The clips are launched in uneven intervals at an unannounced time, leaving the viewer in suspense for a short, but still indefinite time. If a clip is launched during school time, it will portray a school situation. The young viewers will then probably be in school themselves. Thus, the innovative distribution works to keep the viewer in the fictional world at the same time as it blurs the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. The second aspect of this talk will focus on how Skams’ melodramatic narrative is particularly fit to describe young people’s lives, choices, and destinies. This part of the presentation will show the striking similarities concerning dramatic construction between Skam and Ibsens’ modern plays, a narrative and thematic pattern well known from current Hollywood-blockbusters.
The presentation will argue that both these aspects involve key elements in L1-literature teaching; new medias’ possibilities blurring fiction and non-fiction, and how certain forms of dramaturgic arcs seem to affect human feelings more than others. These aspects increase the need for fictional prior understanding and awareness of dramaturgic structure.
The theoretical approach in this talk is cognitive narratology (Hogan 2003), a conceptual framework for interpreting the melodramatic film (Evans 2006; Harms Larsen 2005) and melodramatic literature (Brooks 1985), as well as narrative didactics (Bruner 1996), and youth cultures and media (Drotner 1995).
Brooks, P. (1985). The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, melodrama, and the mode of excess. New York, Columbia University Press.
Bruner, J. S. (1996). Frames of thinking. In Modes of thought : explorations in culture and cognition. D. R. Olson and N. Torrance. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Drotner, K. (1995). At skabe sig selv : ungdom, æstetik, pædagogik. København, Gyldendal.
Evans, M. (2006). Innføring i dramaturgi : teater, film, fjernsyn. Oslo, Cappelen akademisk forl.
Harms Larsen, P. and P. Harms Larsen (2005). De levende billeders dramaturgi : Bind 1 : Fiktionsfilm. København, Danmarks Radio.
Hogan, P. C. (2003). The Mind and it's Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press