SKAM Austin

SKAM Austin focuses on the lives of a group of students attending Bouldin High School in Austin, Texas. The first season focuses on Megan Flores, who is forced to deal with the consequences of her romantic relationship with Marlon, who used to be involved with her former best friend, Abby, the captain of Bouldin High's dance team, the Kittens. The second season focuses on Grace Olsen, one of Megan's best friends, who struggles with her feelings for Daniel Williamson, Bouldin High's captain of the football team. These feelings cause her to question her own beliefs as a feminist and put her friendships with Megan, Kelsey, Jo and Zoya in peril as a result.

On April 19, 2018, the first short clips of the series were released, announcing April 24 as the official start of the series' daily releases.[16] Social media accounts for some of the fictional characters had started posting content earlier, sometimes as far back as April 2017.[17]

In a positive review, Den of Geek's Kayti Burt gave the first episode a rating of 3.5 out of 5 and described the series as a "a little bit like SKAM (the Norwegian teen drama upon which it's based), a little bit like Friday Night Lights, and a little bit like its own, wonderful thing."[18] In another favorable critique, Common Sense Media's Joyce Slaton gave the series a rating of four out of five stars and compared it positively against other teen dramas saying, "It moves a bit slowly, true. But so does real life -- and though SKAM Austin is no vérité documentary, it reads a lot more authentic than Riverdale or 13 Reasons Why."[19]

Solfrid Skaret of Norwegian news publication TV 2 opined that SKAM Austin was a "flop". She cited viewership figures, showing an initial premiere-episode audience of 11.9 million viewers, with substantial drops in subsequent episodes, down to approximately 771.800 viewers for the fifth episode, although acknowledging an uptick in ratings for the sixth episode. Commenting on the developments, John Magnus Dahl, a Skam researcher at the University of Bergen, told TV 2 that it was an "incredibly sad development". He further stated that SKAM Austin is "a good series that has reached a lot of people, but the problem is that they haven't been able to keep people's attention", and reasoned that the lack of interest may be caused by the story. "That the story is identical to the Norwegian success is probably disappointing to some people. There are no surprise moments."[20] Christopher Pahle of Norwegian press publication Dagbladet objected to Skaret's article and specifically its negative outlook of the show's performance. Pahle explained that, while the viewership numbers were objective and factual, SKAM Austin could not accurately be compared to the rest of the television industry due to its distribution on Facebook's new video platform, where Austin's audience numbers might be within expectations and the initial premiere rating could be heavily inflated due to a high volume of one-time viewers tempted to test the new service rather than dedicated viewers. The reporter also wrote that the original Norwegian production's success had also become its own worst enemy, elaborating that Skam itself did not have high ratings in its first season, was released stealthily to avoid older generations, and that the high expectations set forth by the Norwegian series' popularity meant news media might unfairly consider anything short of a total success a failure.[21]

Slate's Inkoo Kang described the series' heavy use of Facebook services as a questionable action, dubbing the series "both innovative teen drama" and an "advertisement for Facebook". The report noted that while Skam also employed social media actively in its plot, Austin's characters have constant presence and common interactions through Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, all owned by Facebook, while competing social networks Snapchat and YouTube are only mentioned, never shown. The article also noted that Snapchat, Facebook's "rival for the hearts and thumbs of America’s youth", was used as the platform of choice for a storyline involving the potential dissemination of a graphic image of blood on sheets, and that the distinctive sounds of instant messages through Facebook's Messenger service served as an "unofficial soundtrack". The article described the show's situation as "vaguely alarming", a "glamorization" of Facebook, as a contribution to the "normalization of the company’s grip on high-schoolers’ social lives", and that "content has seldom felt so indistinguishable from marketing".[22]

• SKAM Austin on Facebook
• SKAM Austin at IMDb