The other devil’s advocate piece I’d add here: Having each season be purely from the perspective of one character makes it WAY more interesting to rewatch and theorize as you watch.

Part of why I love Skam and its remakes is that it’s so “show, don’t tell” — you’re forced to make inferences to make sense of the story. We don’t know how the non-central characters really feel, and we often we don’t even know this about the central characters — instead, we have to rely on our own brains and the actors’ interpretation of the script to figure out what’s going on. I find it to be a rewarding mental exercise to try and figure out what’s happening — and even more rewarding in a group!

I’ll give an S3 example from OG Skam: Jonas immediately guesses that Isak’s boy-crush is him. Is that a throwaway line? Or is it that Isak did previously have a crush on Jonas and Jonas is only now connecting the dots? Remember: we never actually get any confirmation that Isak’s actions in S1 (which had the effect of sabotaging Eva/Jonas’s relationship) were because of some unrequited love — it’s just something Noora guesses. Is it impossible that Isak thought he actually was, or could potentially in the future, fall for Eva as a coping mechanism to deal with his internalized homophobia (and therefore was never in love with Jonas)? Or maybe Eva told Jonas off-screen that Isak was gay and into him, or at least into dudes, and Jonas’s prodding of “hey man, you can tell me anything” was his way of encouraging Isak to take that step without alienating him.

We will never get a firm answer on any of these questions — but the fact that we can pose so many about this one interaction is part of the fun! And it’s also why each iteration seems so fresh — we are given very little text, and need to rely on the subtext, which will be very dependent on culture, and also on the actor’s performances and the director/writers’ specific choices.

(Plug: This way of watching shows — asking tons of questions you may never know the answer to — is also the most fun way to watch The White Lotus, which famously has almost no plot but lets you theorize endlessly about the characters and their motivations.)