General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Skam France

Skam France is a French teen drama web series, the French adaptation of the Norwegian series Skam, broadcast on the france.tv slash platform of France Télévisions from 5 February 2018 to 7 July 2023 across twelve seasons and 122 episodes.¹^•² It was the first foreign remake of the Norwegian original: France was, for a time, the only country whose adaptation went beyond the four seasons of the Norwegian series.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original run	5 February 2018 to 7 July 2023; 12 seasons, 122 episodes¹^•²
Broadcaster	france.tv slash, the digital offer of France Télévisions for 18- to 30-year-olds⁵
Format	Each season follows one character; short clips of 3 to 5 minutes released daily, plus weekly full episodes of about 22 minutes²^•⁶
Relationship to original	Seasons 1 and 2 closely adapt the Norwegian storylines; from season 5 onward the seasons are original creations⁷
Setting	The fictional Parisian high school Lycée Dorian⁸
Viewership	Over 480 million cumulative video views across 12 seasons (France Télévisions, May 2025)⁹
Status	Ended; the complete series returned to france.tv in May 2025¹^•⁹

Spoilers

Seasons and characters

The twelve seasons, each named for its central character, ran as follows: Emma (2018, 9 episodes), Manon (2018, 13), Lucas (2019), Imane (2019), Arthur (2020), Lola (2020), Tiffany (2021), Bilal (2021), Maya (2022), Anaïs (2022), Rym (2023), and Maël (2023).¹ The founding ensemble cast included Philippine Stindel (Emma), Marilyn Lima (Manon), Lula Cotton-Frapier (Daphné), Assa Sylla (Imane), Coline Preher (Alexia), and Michel Biel (Charles).¹¹

Several seasons drew particular attention. Season 3 (2019) followed Lucas, played by Axel Auriant, as he learned to accept his homosexuality.⁵ Season 4 centered on Imane, a practicing Muslim young woman, with parents more present on screen than in earlier seasons.¹² In season 5, Arthur (Robin Migné) suffers a sudden, near-total loss of hearing at the start of 2020, and the season introduced two new deaf characters, Noée and Camille, played by the deaf actors Winona Guyon and Lucas Wild.⁵

Format and storytelling

The series retains the narrative model of the Norwegian original. Each season centers on a different character and follows the daily life of a group of high-school friends, with societal themes affecting teenagers treated directly.⁶^•⁹ Distribution was transmedia: a short clip of roughly three minutes appeared every weekday at a fixed time (10:37 at launch), supplemented by mini-episodes of 3 to 5 minutes on france.tv slash, the series' YouTube channel, and its official Facebook page, with a full episode assembling the week's clips.²

Social media extended the fiction beyond the clips. All the characters had Instagram accounts; when a character posted a story, the company Bigger Than Fiction managed the account and released the video images in real time, complementing the episodes while they aired.¹⁰ This microepisodic release pattern, with clips dropping at plot-relevant moments between full episodes, generated active viewer engagement and, as with the original, prompted fans abroad to build unofficial transnational export channels, including a fansubbing community that subtitled the French adaptation into multiple languages.⁸

From adaptation to original creation

In 2017 the Norwegian broadcaster NRK signed the agreement for the French adaptation, and Skam France became the first foreign remake of the series.³ The first two seasons were a faithful adaptation, recontextualizing some plot elements for a French audience; viewers and critics noted that they followed the Norwegian original nearly scene by scene.³

The turn to original stories. Seasons 5 and 6 were not adaptations of a foreign version but pure creation, as Sened Dhab, Director of Digital Fiction at France Télévisions, explained; seasons 3 and 4 had already taken more liberty in anchoring the characters' destinies in a French socio-cultural reality, which he credited with the public's enthusiasm.⁷ Seasons 5 and 6 were shot simultaneously to rationalize budgets and sustain a demanding production rhythm.⁷ This original production is what allowed the French version to outlast the Norwegian format's four seasons, a distinction the CNC (Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée) highlighted as notable among the international remakes.⁴ Skam France remained the longest-running remake until wtFOCK (Belgium) overtook it in 2024.⁸

Production

The series was directed by David Hourrègue, Shirley Monsarrat, and Manon Gaurin, with Niels Rahou as directeur de collection (series editor), and was produced as a France-Belgium co-production.⁶^•¹³ The production pace was dense: cinematographer Xavier Dolléans, who worked on the series with director David Hourrègue, described a previous collaboration shot at 18 useful minutes per day, a rhythm carried over to meet Skam's visual requirements.¹⁰

Reception and viewership

The series became a phenomenon from its 2018 launch, driven by social media and the france.tv platform.⁹ Cumulative views on the website and YouTube channel grew from 130 million over the first five seasons to more than 400 million by the twelfth and final season, and France Télévisions put the total at more than 480 million video views across all twelve seasons in its May 2025 press release announcing the full series' return to france.tv.⁸^•⁹ As of May 2025, almost two years after the final episode, the official Instagram account still had 166,000 followers.⁸

Viewer ratings have been moderate relative to the series' reach: AlloCiné's spectator average stands at 3.6 out of 5 from about 1,400 ratings, and the series holds an 8.1 rating (about 3,700 votes) on IMDb-derived aggregators.¹²^•⁶ After the finale, the series was marked as ended, with no further season confirmed, and it remains available in France on SFR Play and the France TV Amazon Channel.¹^•⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026