Since its launch in late 2015, the Norwegian web-series Skam ( Shame), produced by public broadcaster NRK, has become one of the most notable successes in Norwegian television history, both in terms of ratings and critical acclaim. A high-school web-series about teenagers, mostly girls, coming of age in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, the series not only depicts young people in their everyday digital-media use but also reaches its audience through these same media and in a variety of formats extending far beyond video clips. Its success, we argue, is significantly tied to its multimedial form and distribution. We unpack the show’s sociocultural potential by analyzing its various outputs (video clips, screen grabs of the characters’ messenger chats, and updates from their Instagram accounts), as well as the audience’s/users’ responses to these in the form of comments to the web page. We argue that the show functions as a “transitional object” (per Winnicott) for its teen audiences, providing them with a “potential space” (also from Winnicott) in which they can learn how to cope with the challenges of a media-saturated society.

As mobile screen technologies are becoming more and more integral to all aspects of everyday life, including toilet visits, this essay argues that understanding situated reception contexts in terms of television culture and aesthetics is key for the further development of the field of television studies. It suggests some key question for television studies going forward like: what effect does the specificity of the screen have, whether the screen is public or private, large or small, mobile or immobile, on television culture and texts? By using Skam as a case study, this essay points to some of the implications that mobile screen technologies might have for for television storytelling, aesthetics and distribution going forward.

This article introduces quantitative reception aesthetics as a method and demonstrates how big data derived from social media services and textual analysis can be employed to uncover hitherto hidden processes of media spectatorship. It demonstrates how mixing quantitative and qualitative methods allows us to understand textual engagement and how media spectatorship evolves over time. Taking the Norwegian web series, Skam (2015–2017), as its case study, the article demonstrates how (web)television engagement on Instagram is linked to aesthetics and narrative events and how textual engagement is more universal than perhaps post-structuralist reception studies of media reception might have us believe.

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