‘SKAM Italia did it again’. The multiple lives of a format adaptation from production to audience experience

SKAM Italia, the Italian version of the Norwegian SKAM format, was first released in Spring 2018 and has reached its fourth season in May 2020, overcoming several industrial struggles and slowly engaging an increasing, young and local audience. This article aims to integrate a production–distribution and reception perspective, showing how they mutually reinforce the series’ identity: the peculiarity of SKAM’s distribution system fostered the audience’s engagement, until its complicated production history brought the series to a more conventional circulation. Mutual exchanges between professionals and audiences on a global level are always counterbalanced by national negotiations, influencing the series’ life cycle. The article deals with a groundbreaking foreign scripted format and with its national remake, its adaptation and reception, contributing to the emerging field of study on the transnational connections between different countries, markets, audiences and culture in contemporary television fiction; its original methodology, separately reconstructing the production and distribution history and the audience reception, and then connecting these entangled parts of a television experience in their constant, ongoing developments, provides a framework useful to study media texts.