This article addresses the production, distribution and global expansion of the online teen drama, SKAM/SHAME (2015–2017), produced by the Norwegian public service broadcaster NRK. The article combines perspectives on transmedia storytelling with production studies and studies of public service broadcasting to investigate the distinct production, publishing and promotion models underpinning SKAM, as well as its public service mission. Furthermore, it addresses SKAM’s transition from a ‘secret’ online teen drama targeting young Norwegians in season one to a global cult phenomenon with viewers and fans in all age groups and on all continents in seasons three and four, and relates this expansion to recent shifts within the television industry.

This article investigates the motives for entering a digital fan community and becoming a fan for the first time-and, subsequently, leaving it again-by focusing on these fans' main entry and exit points. It looks at the fan community following the Norwegian hit show SKAM (2015-17), which grew over its four seasons into a global cult phenomenon with viewers and fans of all ages from around the world. Empirically, the article draws on forty-seven interviews with Scandinavian SKAM fans between the ages of thirteen and seventy. Based on these interviews, the article presents a tripartite model through which fan motivations are located in the intersections among intrapersonal, social, and transmedial factors.

This article develops a theoretical perspective to study the conditions for media policy formation under the condition of digitalization – the Media Policy Field approach – building on an organizational field approach in combination with theories of policy development. The theory of strategic action fields offers a meso-level view of how actors in media fields interact and how their respective opportunities for influencing policy are structured by the state of the field and their respective positions. This theory is linked with the Multiple Streams Approach, which maintains that change occurs when policy entrepreneurs connect problem, policy and politics streams, and create policy windows. The Media Policy Field approach proposes three analytical foci for the study of current media policy processes: collective frames, incumbent and challenger roles and policy windows. Empirical strategies for pursuing this theoretical programme are discussed.

This study analyzes how media industry players have influenced media political solutions to digitalization, using data from the daily press and policy documents in the period from 1998 to 2017 as sources. It concentrates on two specific areas of media policy: public service broadcasting (PSB) and press subsidies. Based on a media policy field approach, this study identifies key collective frames and the players that promote them, and shows how policy windows are created. The study finds that there is strong continuity in terms of the basic frames used to discuss media policy and in the actors involved in creating collective frames, which means that the incumbents maintain their positions. Converging frames that include several industry problems are activated to an increasing degree to initiate and influence media policy actions.

This article considers fans’ playful digital practices and focuses on the play moods that are co-constructed in online fan communities. We analyse how these play moods are negotiated across the life course for participating fans. Play moods are closely tied to the playful modes of fan practices, and by gaining a greater understanding of the moods that fans engage in at different stages of their life course we gain new insights into fan play as it relates to issues of age-related norms in fan communities. Specifically, this article analyses the Norwegian teenage streaming drama SKAM (Shame) (NRK, 2015‐17), which was produced for a target audience of 16-year-old Norwegian girls but ended up capturing the hearts of people of all ages across Scandinavia and internationally. This study is based on interviews with 43 Scandinavian fans aged between 13 and 70. The participants were all active on social media (Facebook, Instagram, the show’s blog, etc.) while the show was on the air and the interviews offers insights into issues of age-appropriateness as it relates to fan practices. As such, fans ‘police’ both themselves and each other based on perceptions of age, while also engaging in practices that are by nature playful and may be considered subjectively and culturally ‘youthful’ or ‘childish’. The article combines theory of play and fan studies with a focus on the life course and cultural gerontology in order to highlight these tendencies in the SKAM fandom.