From NRK’s low-budget gamble with Skam to Amazon’s nine-figure bets on BookTok franchises, the TV industry is deploying young-adult drama as its primary weapon in a long-running battle to pull Generation Z back from the digital platforms that have held them for a decade.

The battle to win back young audiences has become one of the defining commissioning challenges of the modern television era, and young-adult (YA) drama has emerged as a primary weapon in that fight. From public broadcasters to global streamers, the industry is pouring resources into content aimed at teenagers and young adults, driven by a recognition that losing this generation to digital platforms carries long-term consequences that go well beyond a dip in ratings.

The roots of the current situation can be traced back over a decade. When YouTube began evolving from a home for short viral clips into a destination for longer-form content, public broadcasters felt the ground shift beneath them. NRK in Norway was among those that responded.

“Public broadcasters felt that they had lost the young generation to YouTube,” recalls Marianne Furevold-Boland, head of drama at NRK, who was then a producer working on youth programming and became instrumental in what she describes as “the mission” to get 16-year-olds back to the broadcaster.

The result was Skam, the teen drama that launched in September 2015 with no publicity and a deliberately grassroots approach. “We decided that we didn’t want to have any kind of publicity at all,” says Furevold-Boland. “We wanted the target audience to discover the show themselves by word of mouth. It was important for us that they embraced it on their own terms.”

Shot on a low budget and built around a pioneering real-time digital narrative, the show grew into an international phenomenon. Localised versions have since been produced in more than 10 territories, and a decade on the brand remains, in the words of Beta Film’s head of kids and family entertainment Claudia Schmitt, “remarkably strong.”

That durability is borne out by the data. According to Parrot Analytics, in 2025 Skam achieved 14.8 times the average peak demand for series in Norway, while the French, Spanish and Italian remakes also performed strongly. Schmitt says Beta receives at least one enquiry per month about new remake opportunities, although “only a small number of partners are invited to develop and present concepts, because NRK carefully safeguards the format’s creative identity.”

The wider YA drama market has grown considerably since Skam launched. Parrot Analytics data shows that YA drama’s share of new series premieres has risen from just above 10% in 2020 to 17.5% in 2025. The key shift driving that growth is a move away from original concepts towards adaptations of YA books, many of them already embedded in online fan communities via platforms such as Wattpad and BookTok.

Amazon Prime Video has been the most aggressive mover in this space. Its most-watched non-English-language originals of the past year are both YA dramas: the Spanish romantic film Culpa Nuestra, drawn from Mercedes Ron’s bestselling Culpables trilogy, and the German series Maxton Hall: The World Between Us, based on Mona Kasten’s YA novels, which became the most successful series launch of any non-American Prime Original when it premiered in 2024.

Speaking at Series Mania this year, Nicole Morganti, head of originals for Southern Europe at Amazon Studios, described how the Culpa Nuestra franchise has grown from a single adaptation into a pipeline spanning 11 titles across multiple territories. “Culpa Mia was an incredible unicorn that you’re lucky you see once in a lifetime, a title watched by 100 million people around the world,” she said. Netflix has its own YA hits, among them Heartstopper and Geek Girl, the latter of which became one of the most-watched Canadian-produced Netflix originals ever.

The rationale for streamer investment is well established. As Parrot Analytics industry insights manager Christofer Hamilton explains, the motivations are both defensive and proactive. Young audiences help reduce churn, “even if parents are paying the bill,” since must-watch content for the whole family is a powerful retention tool. They also generate organic, viral marketing that can grow an audience well beyond its core fanbase. Most significantly, “bringing in young audiences early and developing lifelong habits has massive lifetime value potential.”

The surge of streamer interest has driven fierce competition for book IP and squeezed budgets at public broadcasters and independent producers. Animation offers one route around the literary adaptation arms race, and it is substantial: Parrot Analytics estimates that just under half of global demand for YA drama in 2025 was for animated content, with Asia leading regional performance at 53%.

Arte France is among the public broadcasters pursuing this lane, coproducing Miss Saturne, an animated coming-of-age series based on a 1984-set novel, deliberately conceived for digital-first distribution across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

The imperative behind all of this activity is the same one that sent NRK looking for its 16-year-olds over a decade ago. The platforms have changed and the budgets have ballooned, but the fundamental challenge has not.

From NRK’s low-budget gamble with Skam to Amazon’s nine-figure bets on BookTok franchises, the TV industry is deploying young-adult drama as its primary weapon in a long-running battle to pull Generation Z back from the digital platforms that have held them for a decade.

The battle to win back young audiences has become one of the defining commissioning challenges of the modern television era, and young-adult (YA) drama has emerged as a primary weapon in that fight. From public broadcasters to global streamers, the industry is pouring resources into content aimed at teenagers and young adults, driven by a recognition that losing this generation to digital platforms carries long-term consequences that go well beyond a dip in ratings.

The roots of the current situation can be traced back over a decade. When YouTube began evolving from a home for short viral clips into a destination for longer-form content, public broadcasters felt the ground shift beneath them. NRK in Norway was among those that responded.

“Public broadcasters felt that they had lost the young generation to YouTube,” recalls Marianne Furevold-Boland, head of drama at NRK, who was then a producer working on youth programming and became instrumental in what she describes as “the mission” to get 16-year-olds back to the broadcaster.

The result was Skam, the teen drama that launched in September 2015 with no publicity and a deliberately grassroots approach. “We decided that we didn’t want to have any kind of publicity at all,” says Furevold-Boland. “We wanted the target audience to discover the show themselves by word of mouth. It was important for us that they embraced it on their own terms.”

Shot on a low budget and built around a pioneering real-time digital narrative, the show grew into an international phenomenon. Localised versions have since been produced in more than 10 territories, and a decade on the brand remains, in the words of Beta Film’s head of kids and family entertainment Claudia Schmitt, “remarkably strong.”

That durability is borne out by the data. According to Parrot Analytics, in 2025 Skam achieved 14.8 times the average peak demand for series in Norway, while the French, Spanish and Italian remakes also performed strongly. Schmitt says Beta receives at least one enquiry per month about new remake opportunities, although “only a small number of partners are invited to develop and present concepts, because NRK carefully safeguards the format’s creative identity.”

The wider YA drama market has grown considerably since Skam launched. Parrot Analytics data shows that YA drama’s share of new series premieres has risen from just above 10% in 2020 to 17.5% in 2025. The key shift driving that growth is a move away from original concepts towards adaptations of YA books, many of them already embedded in online fan communities via platforms such as Wattpad and BookTok.

Amazon Prime Video has been the most aggressive mover in this space. Its most-watched non-English-language originals of the past year are both YA dramas: the Spanish romantic film Culpa Nuestra, drawn from Mercedes Ron’s bestselling Culpables trilogy, and the German series Maxton Hall: The World Between Us, based on Mona Kasten’s YA novels, which became the most successful series launch of any non-American Prime Original when it premiered in 2024.

Speaking at Series Mania this year, Nicole Morganti, head of originals for Southern Europe at Amazon Studios, described how the Culpa Nuestra franchise has grown from a single adaptation into a pipeline spanning 11 titles across multiple territories. “Culpa Mia was an incredible unicorn that you’re lucky you see once in a lifetime, a title watched by 100 million people around the world,” she said. Netflix has its own YA hits, among them Heartstopper and Geek Girl, the latter of which became one of the most-watched Canadian-produced Netflix originals ever.

The rationale for streamer investment is well established. As Parrot Analytics industry insights manager Christofer Hamilton explains, the motivations are both defensive and proactive. Young audiences help reduce churn, “even if parents are paying the bill,” since must-watch content for the whole family is a powerful retention tool. They also generate organic, viral marketing that can grow an audience well beyond its core fanbase. Most significantly, “bringing in young audiences early and developing lifelong habits has massive lifetime value potential.”

The surge of streamer interest has driven fierce competition for book IP and squeezed budgets at public broadcasters and independent producers. Animation offers one route around the literary adaptation arms race, and it is substantial: Parrot Analytics estimates that just under half of global demand for YA drama in 2025 was for animated content, with Asia leading regional performance at 53%.

Arte France is among the public broadcasters pursuing this lane, coproducing Miss Saturne, an animated coming-of-age series based on a 1984-set novel, deliberately conceived for digital-first distribution across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

The imperative behind all of this activity is the same one that sent NRK looking for its 16-year-olds over a decade ago. The platforms have changed and the budgets have ballooned, but the fundamental challenge has not.