General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Skam NL

Skam NL is a Dutch teen drama series, produced by the public broadcaster NTR, that remade the Norwegian series Skam for a Dutch audience. It follows a group of teenagers at a secondary school in Utrecht in their everyday lives, and it tells its story in real time across television, YouTube, and Instagram.¹^•² The series ran for two seasons, from September 2018 to June 2019, and was canceled before completing the four-season structure of the original format.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original run	Season 1: September 16 – November 25, 2018; Season 2: March 26 – June 4, 2019³
Production	NTR, for the NPO3 youth channel; directed by Bobbie Koek, Isabel Lamberti, and Floor van der Meulen, script by Ashgan El-Hamus⁵^•²
Setting	A secondary school in Utrecht, the Netherlands¹
Format	Clips posted four or five times a week on the series website and YouTube channel, compiled into a full episode broadcast Sundays at 20:25 on NPO3⁶
Episodes	21 episodes across two seasons; IMDb rating 7.8/10 from about 620 user votes⁷^•⁸
Main cast	Suus de Nies (Isa Keijser), Zoë Love Smith (Liv Reijners), Bo van Borssum Waalkes (Engel Beekman), Reiky de Valk (Kes de Beus), Florian Regtien (Lucas van der Heijden)⁵^•⁸
Cancellation	The first of the Skam remakes to be canceled, ending after two of the format's four seasons⁴

Spoilers

Story and characters

Season 1 centers on Isa Keijser, played by Suus de Nies, the Dutch counterpart of the Norwegian protagonist Eva Kviig Mohn; like her Norwegian original, Isa has her own Instagram account through which her life unfolds in web videos and posts.¹¹ NTR's 2018 annual report describes the series as zooming in on the lives of a group of 16- and 17-year-old girls, their first love relationships, the search for boundaries and their own principles, and the pressure of pursuing dreams and ambitions.¹²

The remake also localized the original's Muslim character Sana. The Dutch remake gives the role to Imaan during season one, but in season two a new hijabi character, Esra (played by Melisa Diktas), takes her place; whereas the Belgian version removes the veil because of legal restrictions, the Dutch one keeps the character veiled throughout.¹³ The second-season cast list did not include Sara Awin, who had played Imaan, and the actress confirmed on Instagram that the character would not return.¹⁴

Seasons and cancellation

Season 1 ran from September 16 to November 25, 2018, and season 2 from March 26 to June 4, 2019, with the full episodes moving from Sunday to Tuesday nights for the second season.³^•¹⁴ NTR's 2019 annual report called the second series an even greater success than the first, and highlighted a scene in the final episode in which the Norwegian character Eskild meets his Dutch counterpart.¹⁵

Despite this, the series was canceled and no third season was filmed. A study of Skam internet fandom notes that SKAM NL was the first of the remakes to be canceled, before finishing the original four-season structure of the franchise.⁴ The same study observes that the Dutch version was widely regarded as the closest shot-for-shot remake of the series, and that because Dutch is linguistically close to both German and Norwegian, fans outside the Netherlands were not strongly motivated to follow it alongside the other remakes.⁴

Background: the Skam format

Skam was a Norwegian web series produced by the public broadcaster NRK from 2015 to 2017, written and directed by Julie Andem. It published short video clips, screenshots of characters' text-message chats, and Instagram posts on a dedicated website in real time, so that the story's diegetic time matched the viewer's time, and compiled each week's clips into a full episode broadcast on Friday nights.⁹ The format was built on extensive interviews with teenagers, with a stated mission of helping 16-year-old girls strengthen their self-esteem by dismantling taboos.⁹

The series became an international phenomenon through fan-subtitled pirated clips and social media discussion, and NRK sold the format to producers in other countries. According to a European Audiovisual Observatory analysis, SKAM was the most-remade European television fiction of its period, with adaptations in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain.¹⁰ NRK's head of youth TV, Haakon Moslet, said that producers adapting the concept were expected to research their own national target group and find what is unique about local teenagers' dreams and dilemmas, "not just copying the original".²

Production and distribution

NTR bought the Dutch remake rights and produced the series for NPO3, the public youth channel.⁶ The Nederlands Film Festival catalog describes it as a pioneering series with social media extensions, broadcast both linearly and online, in which the Dutch Skam shows how today's adolescent generation deals with shame; because it is unclear when, where, and in what form the next narrative snippet will appear, viewers are prompted to discuss it among themselves, blurring the border between fiction and reality.⁵

Real-time release. As in the original, the story played out in real time: if the characters went to a party at 1 a.m. on Saturday night, the clip was posted at that moment. Clips appeared four or five times a week on the series website and its YouTube channel, and the week's material was assembled into one episode shown on NPO3 on Sunday evenings at 20:25.⁶ Every character had an Instagram account, and the characters reacted to one another, letting viewers learn more about them between clips.⁶

No promotion. The series followed the original's word-of-mouth marketing strategy: no publicity campaign preceded it. A producer involved explained that teenagers do not want to hear from parents or traditional media what is cool, so the series was left for them to discover themselves.⁶

Reception and afterlife

NTR reported that SKAM NL was hugely popular with its target group and was rated very highly by international fans in the countries where the series was then being made.¹² A Swedish guide to the remakes described Skam NL as one of the adaptations that best captured the atmosphere of the original while still pursuing something entirely its own.¹⁶ On IMDb the series holds a 7.8/10 rating from about 620 votes, with season 1 episodes generally rated between 8.7 and 9.4 and season 2 episodes between 7.5 and 8.1.⁷ The Betafilm distribution catalog for the Skam remakes listed the Dutch version with 70,000 YouTube subscribers.¹⁷

The series remains accessible: the full episodes are available on NPO Start, and the clips remain on the series' YouTube channel, where international fans have watched them with fan-made subtitles.¹⁸ Because a character from the Norwegian original appears in Skam NL, some fans treat it as the one remake set in the same fictional universe as the original series rather than a fully separate national version.⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Comedy, drama, and general-genre web series › Premiered 2017 to 2021

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

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