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. On social media, fandoms developed creative paintings, screensavers, phone covers, and fan videos. Filming locations, including Sagene Church, and the Hartvig Nissen school, were visited by fans, and the actors were receiving worldwide attention. After being featured in an episode in the third season, Gabrielle's song "5 fine frøkner" saw a 3,018 percent increase in listening on Spotify, with over 13 million streams and, at one point, rising to eighth place on the Swedish top music rankings. 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". NRK stated that "We want to thank our international fans and followers who have embraced SKAM. We are blown away by your dedication – it is something we never expected. That is why it hurts to tell you guys that due to a necessary clarification with the music right holders, SKAM will until further notice not be available outside Norway. We are working hard to figure out how to solve this issue so that the fans can continue to enjoy SKAM from where they are". When the fourth season premiered in April, the geoblock was removed for Nordic countries.
The series has received significant attention from international media publications for its unique distribution model of real-time snippet-based information.
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 Daily's 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. In the second, she specifically focused on the series' ending, noting that it originally had nine characters designed to each lead a season, and quoted fans with the sentiment that "It seems like such an abrupt decision. It doesn't serve the storyline at all." Acknowledging the pressure of the show's global popularity as potentially a key element to end Skam, Leszkiewicz highlighted some fans' disapproval of the storylines presented towards the ending; season four's main character Sana, a member of the Muslim religion who had been under-represented in the series, had a shorter amount of focus in her season than other main characters had at their respective times; the final moments of the series focused on short stories by characters not given their own season, one of which told the story of a minor character without significant relevancy to the series; and a lackluster conversation about Islamophobia between Sana and her white, non-Muslim friend Isak. Leszkiewicz quoted disgruntled fans, one of which said that "Sana has been disrespected and disregarded and erased and sidelined and that is fucking gross. She deserved better". Finally, in her last report, she focused on Skam's 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.
