Skam Facebook: When you can’t win the game, change the game
Ferris was right about life, it comes at you pretty fast. In the middle of the short-term noise it can be easy to miss the firing gun going off on what can sometimes prove to be systemic change. A few weeks back Facebook Watch quietly confirmed that they would be commissioning Season two of SKAM Austin; recommitting themselves to try to reshape the rules of how we consume entertainment content to better fit the platforms we live on. And which they own. When Facebook can’t beat YouTube for millennial video consumption it looks like they’re trying to change what we understand video entertainment is.
Skam Austin, the Norwegian show from Facebook Watch
Outside of the US, SKAM Austin (Skam means ‘Shame’ in the show’s original Norwegian) hasn’t picked up a huge amount of buzz in marketing and media circles but it is worth taking a hard look at.
The storyline is simple: a US high school, a girlfriend spurned and a series of complicated historical relationships and mysteries to be worked out. Unlike a hundred other shows this sounds like, SKAM Austin plays out differently. It’s less that you watch it, more that you become natively co-opted into the texture of it. It’s hyper real (and street cast starred) main story arc arrives in your feed in real time, when something in the storyline happens late at night that’s when a few minutes of film appears with the immediacy of an update from your friends. As you dig deeper you find the characters all have full-blooded historical social footprints stretching back years, the shots on Instagram from a year back dropping plot clues. You follow them and they follow back and share their meme-inflected GIFs that round out your understanding of the relationships between them. The characters engage with real-world news and celebrity events and flip between Facebook, Messenger and Instagram as their stories splinter and draw in an ever widening network of characters.
The times we live in being what they are, the characters and the viewers quickly merge in online discussions, comments and feedback loops that alter the storylines. The linear and structured 30 or 60 minute traditional entertainment show format is utterly fractured and I can personally vouch for the insane levels of stickiness that being able to lose yourself in self-directed back story across platforms creates. Despite resolutely remaining an aging British man, it takes only days to lose the sense of being in a directed narrative and you sense yourself as somehow both voyeuristically observing and participating in life at Bouldin High School. It’s not entirely authentic of course, these teens seem be significantly more faithful to Facebook Inc. than to their partners, we never see them using Snap or Twitter.
The numbers for Series one weren’t huge by broadcast standards, 11 million was as high it went. Regardless, Facebook Watch has quietly made it one of only four show formats that it has renewed. There’s something about what SKAM Austin represents that they want to, perhaps needs to get right. If they can create entertainment that can only truly live on their platforms, effectively creating a whole new genre of entertainment then they’ve (again) written the rules for a game only they can win.
Stuart Bowden is the global chief strategy officer for Wavemaker