Sorry to hijack your post for the nth time, but the realism argument is… such bullshit. SKAM wasn’t developed to be a grimdark show where characters were put through the grinder for the sake of unflinchingly portraying the horror of modern teen life. SKAM was developed to help teenagers (and specifically teen girls) confront the things they are ashamed of (their skam, if you will) by talking frankly to their target audience.
SKAM is an educational show. It’s not Breaking Bad or The Wire.
The reason SKAM (and, in theory, its remakes) feels so realistic is because you’re not going to reach teens, or, indeed, any viewer, if you show them a PSA or a Sex Ed video. SKAM feels realistic, but ultimately, the point of it is to offer hope and solutions. That’s why it’s so important that the slang spoken by the characters is accurate, and not the typical made up teen slang by writers who haven’t been teens in decades. That’s why it’s so important that we stay locked in a character’s POV and don’t move to more exciting storylines when the character is going through a hard time. We need to be able to look at a character and say, “that’s me! That’s me just waking up, that’s me composing a text I don’t have the balls to send, that’s me with acne, that’s me taking a gay test at 3 AM because I can’t sleep, that’s me being unable to leave the bed because I woke up naked beside someone I barely know.” We need to believe these characters could be real, not inconsistent creations that change their behavior from clip to clip to serve the plot.
The reason we need to believe these characters could be real, is because we need to be able to believe that when the character takes steps to solve their problems, it could happen to us too. When Eva grabs Ingrid and apologizes to her in full, it would be just as realistic for Ingrid to pull Eva’s hair and tell her to fuck off. It would be a realistic outcome! But SKAM wants its audience to believe that if they’ve wronged a friend, if it feels like the whole school hates you, and like your only choice is to transfer, not all is lost. It might still be possible to reach an agreement with your former friend, it might still be possible to tell your friends about what happened to you at your boyfriend’s place, it might still be possible to come out to your best friend and not be rejected out of hand, it might still be possible to say, “being me feels so oppressive that I took it out on my friends, and I’m sorry.”
SKAM wanted to help its audience. And when I see scenes like Yann abandoning Lucas in that bench, which isn’t even consistent with his previous characterization, when I see Imane tearfully apologizing to her friends and her so-called friends responding to her apology by asking her if she’s just so unhappy that she wants to make her own friends unhappy too, when I see Milan leaning into Robbe’s space and stroking his cheek in front of Robbe’s homophobic friends, and when I see Sander being accused of committing abuse and not having Robbe’s consent (on a show that has already dealt with consent in its previous season no less), I don’t see an intent to help. I see writers wanting to be shocking and wanting to upset their audience, to raise the stakes, but not actually wanting to deal with the hurt and pain that would inevitably (realistically, you would say) have been inflicted by those actions upon not just the characters, but the audience too.
And, at this point, you might say. Well, that was SKAM’s mission statement, but the remakes aren’t beholden to such lofty goals. And you’d be wrong lol, because every remake team had to agree to conducting research among local teens if they wanted to buy the rights to SKAM. NRK wanted to ensure that all the remakes would remain educational and be relevant and helpful to teens in every remake country. Fortunately for certain remakes, NRK isn’t as much of a hardass as certain crew would have us believe, or they’d be fucked.
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