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As usual, whenever I go away on my travels, I like to take a look at what TV’s popular or important enough in my destination that it warrants having an advertising hoarding. So far, I’ve given you the lowdown on my travels to LA, New York, Lisbon and Athens, but over Christmas, I was in Berlin.
In contrast to Lisbon, which is a city with an obvious love of imported TV, Berlin loves its home-grown German TV (even if the airwaves are as filled with imports as Lisbon’s). True, as I was leaving the city, I spotted a hoarding for Amazon’s Goliath – I couldn’t be bothered to take a photo of it, but imagine this except in German and alternating with an ad for a plumber every three seconds:
But that was a rarity. Otherwise, it was Deutschland all the way.
Also out in suburbs was a hoarding for the German Sat 1 TV series Einstein. Mr Thierry Attard can give you a far better overview of the show, but its basic set-up is:
Actor and singer Tom Beck (Alarm für Cobra 11 – Die Autobahn Polizeï) stars as Felix Winterberg, great-great grandson of Albert Einstein and scientific genius himself, who unwillingly ends up as a police consultant.
Again, I didn’t bother to take a picture of that hoarding but imagine this as a vertical:
And here’s the show itself:
Not exactly world-beating TV, but as I’ve pointed out before, it does at least highlight the inaccuracy of everyone’s stereotype about Germans having no sense of humour. If you know them, then you know that you honestly can’t stop them mucking around.
In central Berlin, though, two shows dominated. In common with Einstein, the first is a crime show – or really the latest in a series of mini-series based on books by popular German mystery author Nele Neuhaus that are collectively known as the ‘Taunuskrimi’ (Taunus crime stories). Based in the rural area of Taunus near Frankfurt, the stories feature two cops – Oliver von Bodenstein (Tim Bergmann) and Pia Kirchhoff (Felicitas Woll) – investigating all kinds of nastiness against a somewhat mystical backdrop that’s all shot very glossily.
Airing on public service broadcaster ZDF/2DF (basically, the BBC of Germany), the series started in 2013 with Schneewittchen muss sterben (Snow White must die) and since then, there’s been Eine unbeliebte Frau (An Unloved Woman), Mordsfreunde (Murder Friends), Tiefe Wunden (Deep Wounds) and Wer Wind sät (Who sows wind). Cheery titles, hey? But the latest, part two of which is airing right now in fact, is Die Lebenden und die Toten (The Living and the Dead), as anyone who’s been walking around Berlin can probably tell you:
Roughly translated, that catch-line is “It’s better if you don’t watch it alone”. But suprisingly, you can if you want to, since the whole first episode is on YouTube:
Was that the most heavily publicised German TV programme in Berlin? Not in the slightest. That honour belongs to Winnetou. What’s Winnetou? Well, if all you know about Germans is the stereotypes, this’ll come as a shock to you: it’s a German cowboy series about a man and his Native American best friend. And you really couldn’t escape either of them this Christmas in Berlin.
What’s that only 20m up the road? Yes, it’s another advert for Winnetou, just in case you missed the first one.
Here, the slogan is the somewhat more impressive “The legend lives” because the character of Winnetou is genuinely a legend of German literature:
Winnetou is a fictional Native American hero of several novels written in German by Karl May (1842-1912), one of the best-selling German writers of all time with about 200 million copies worldwide, including the Winnetou trilogy.
According to Karl May’s story, first-person narrator Old Shatterhand encounters the Apache Winnetou, and after initial dramatic events, a true friendship arises between them; on many occasions, they give proof of great fighting skill, but also of compassion for other human beings. It portrays a belief in an innate “goodness” of mankind, albeit constantly threatened by ill-intentioned enemies.
Nondogmatic Christian feelings and values play an important role, and May’s heroes are often described as German Americans.
Winnetou became the chief of the tribe of the Mescalero Apaches (and of the Apaches in general, with the Navajo included) after his father Intschu-tschuna and his sister Nscho-tschi were slain by the white bandit Santer. He rode a horse called Iltschi (“Wind”) and had a famous rifle called Silberbüchse (The Silver Gun, a double-barrelled rifle whose stock and butt were decorated with silver studs). Old Shatterhand became the blood brother of Winnetou and rode the brother of Iltschi, called Hatatitla (Lightning).
There were also no fewer than 11 German Winnetou movies during the 1960s, when he was played by French actor Pierre Brice, who went on to reprise the role in the 1980 TV series Mein Freund Winnetou (My Friend Winnetou) and 1998’s TV mini-series Winnetous Rückkehr (The Return of Winnetou).
So no exaggeration there and commercial, free-to-air broadcaster RTL (think the equivalent of ITV) was hoping that the three-part mini-series (or three TV movies, if you prefer), which aired over Christmas, would do well, particularly since it had invested quite heavily in it. Except it didn’t:
Winnetou, another high-profile German production commissioned by RTL, which aired over the holiday period, was an expensive flop. The three-part limited series, an adaptation of Karl May’s “German Westerns,” started soft — with 5.2 million viewers for the first episode — and slipped sharply. The final episode drew just 2.97 million viewers for a market share of 9.5 percent, well below RTL’s target. The Cologne-based broadcaster has invested heavily in homegrown drama in an effort to compete with the likes of Amazon and Netflix but, so far, has little to show for it. The network remains dependent on shiny-floor reality shows and imported US drama for the bulk of its programming.
So why did it flop? I can’t speak for Germans, obviously – they might have gone off Westerns by now, for all I know – but what I caught actually looked really good: there was some lovely attention to period detail, a fair bit of cash had been spent on it and it even had the Native American characters speaking Lakota.
However, the casting is a bit problematic, shall we say? While the marvellously named and moderately famous Wotan Wilke Möhring obviously has no problems playing German immigrant Old Shatterhand/Karl May, it all gets a bit tricky with the native Americans. While there are plenty of Native Americans in the US, the number in Germany and/or who can speak German is quite small, so RTL chose Albanian actor Nik Xhelilaj to play Winnetou as well as a whole bunch of Croatians to play the rest of his tribe. Which means that while sure, they can do an accent, do they, erm, look the part? Not so much.
Still, if you can watch a Spaghetti Western with a clean conscience, Winnetou will probably cause you no harm and what I saw of it was pretty solidly decent. Here’s a trailer:
UPDATED: I got a bit confused (as did Sat 1) about dates, thanks to the change in year from 2016 to 2017, so I’ve updated the section on Einstein accordingly (HT to Mr Attard!)
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It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
Well hello. How are you today? Have a nice break away from it all? That’s what I like to hear.
Right, that’s the small talk done. Let’s talk telly.
So, I didn’t watch an awful lot over the Christmas break, since I was actually in Germany and if you’ve ever watched German TV, you’ll remember what a mistake that was (more about that tomorrow). But after the jump I’ll be talking about the regulars I did watch, including the return of Doctor Who (briefly) and Sherlock (less briefly):
Global Internet
The OA
UK
Doctor Who, Sherlock
France
Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau)
US
Shooter
However, New Year’s Day was on Sunday and Americans being quite efficient, there have already been two new shows to grace the screens. I’ve already reviewed Ransom (US: CBS) but on top of that there was:
The Mick (US: Fox)
A gender-swapped, race-swapped Uncle Buck that sees It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia‘s Kaitlin Olson playing the white trash grifter sister to a billionaire’s wife who gets lumbered with looking after the kids when the rich couple go on the run following fraud investigations. If she sticks around, she gets to enjoy the lifestyles of the rich and famous. But she’ll also have to deal with the bitchy neighbours, the bitchy daughter and the entitled son.
The show’s created by John Chernin and Dave Chernin, the creators of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, so you shouldn’t be too surprised to hear that it’s funnier than you might think, more accurate about being poor than you might think and also based around people being mean too one another verbally and physically in order to get one up on everyone else. Olson’s very good as the Mick(ey) of the title and everyone is marvellously bitchy, too.
Except that’s not my idea of fun, so I probably won’t stick with it.
I also watched a movie.
Mechanic: Resurrection (2016)
Sequel in name only to the actually not that bad 2011 Jason Statham remake of the Charles Bronson/Jan-Michael Vincent actioner, The Mechanic. Here, Mechanic: Resurrection throws pretty much all the first movie’s nuance aside in favour of a sort of melange of The Transporter, The Transporter 2 and The Internecine Project. No longer the meticulous hit-man planner of yore, Statham is retired in Brazil until fellow East End child army survivor (don’t ask) turned billionaire bad guy Sam Hazeldine (Peaky Blinders, Resurrection) blackmails him into returning to his old life by abducting new girlfriend Jessica Alba. Only if Statham kills three of Hazeldine’s impossible-to-reach rivals in ways that look like accidents will Hazeldine release Alba. He says.
Foresaking The Mechanic (2011)’s character building and steely professionalism, Mechanic: Resurrection is an insultingly stupid piece of work that tries to give us glossy backdrops, non-stop Statham fight scenes, a bit of ultraviolence and a bit of casual racism as a substitute, hoping we’ll like it better. Certainly, the stars seemed to have liked it, because Alba’s former Afghanistan soldier turned teacher of Cambodian children is an insult to women, but she does get to go to lots of tropical islands; Tommy Lee Jones gets more of the same travel action, but perhaps was also swayed by the chance to play a socialist arms dealer with a James Bond-style underwater base and submarine using all the subtlety he deployed in Under Siege; Michelle Yeoh was purely there for the tropical islands and not to have to do anything athletic for a change, as far as I could tell.
To be fair, most Statham movies take the piss a little bit and Statham is as aware of that as anyone. Certainly, the fact he takes his shirt off in almost every other scene can’t be accidental and I refuse to believe that the FX shots were anything other than deliberate tributes to Derek Meddings’ model work in 1970s James Bond movies. There’s a certain amount of tongue going into cheek here.
But the writing is still terrible and worst of all, almost none of the murders Statham is supposedly hired to make look like accidents would pass as such for more than a minute. Terrible.
In the US: Saturdays, 8/7c, CBS
Canada has spent more than a quarter of century doubling for “Washington State” and other woody parts of the US in countless primetime American TV shows, but the number of such shows that are actually set in Canada is actually perilously small. But following the likes of Flashpoint and Rookie Blue on this largely untrodden path is Ransom, a CBS procedural that’s almost indistinguishable from any other CBS procedural bar the fact it’s set in Montreal.
The show is actually a heinous co-production between CBS, Canada’s Global, France TF1 and Germany’s RTL that follows the golden rule that the more co-production members you have from this international team of banality, the worse your show will be (cf Transporter: The Series). Indeed, the show is produced by the king of the bad international co-production Frank Spotnitz (Hunted, Strike Back). Transporter: The Series was one of his, too, and this is almost as bad, albeit a lot duller.
Supposedly based on the experiences of real life negotiators Laurent Combalbert and Marwan Mery, Ransom stars secretly British actor Luke Roberts (Black Sails, Wolf Hall, Taxi Brooklyn, Holby City) as the head of a private sector firm of negotiators, who use their awesome negotiating powers to help rich people recover their children from greedy foreign kidnappers. Oh, but if only he could have used his powers to save his wife…
Nothing quite says “filmed in Canada” like the presence of Nazneen Contractor (The Border, 24, Covert Affairs, Heroes: Reborn) or Brandon Jay McLaren (Slasher, Graceland, The Killing (US), Being Erica, Falling Skies) in your cast list, so kudos to Ransom for getting both of them in the credits to make up the show’s now-traditional procedural ensemble, with McLaren playing a psychological profiler and Contractor playing Roberts’ deputy. Or stooge. Or something. At least, she gets to explain the plot to McLaren when Roberts isn’t around.
When Roberts is around, he gets to explain the plot to newbie Sarah Greene (no, not that one – the one from Penny Dreadful and Rebellion), a job applicant whom McLaren has rejected for A Dark Reason That Will Be Revealed At The End of The Episode But Which Will Show How Tormented Roberts Is.
And it’s all bobbins. Everything is completed half-arsed. The show wants to be Canadian, but is so bad at even something so simple that despite being set in Montreal (56.9% French speakers, 18.6% English speakers), no one speaks French or has a French accent and there was only one piece of writing actually in French. And that’s despite being filmed in Canada – I shudder to think what level of authenticity the show will stoop to when it starts going on its promised globe-trotting.
Ransom also wants to be about crises while still being different to Flashpoint so makes its crisis people private sector. Except it still wants to be a procedural, so everyone still goes round interviewing people, finding dead bodies, doing DNA analysis et al like they’re the police, except without warrants et al. It all actually gets a bit creepy when they’re snooping around schools trying to extract pupils’ home addresses from unsuspecting teachers by pretending to be famous soccer players.
On top of that, they have to sort out the affected rich family of the week’s marital/parenting problems (“You need to tell her about this”), while still being terribly nice when it turns out that the rich family aren’t rich enough any more to pay their bills. Because we all know how well that usually works out in the US.
The show is stupid enough it makes Criminal Minds look genuinely smart. As well as constantly having to explain basic human social interactions to the audience (“If you offer them something, they might offer us something in return”), the show also gives us Greene explaining that judging from a kidnapper’s accent, he’s “Mediterranean, probably Greek”. Because Spanish, French, Italian and Greek accents are all very similar, aren’t they? Almost indistinguishable. To be fair, the actor is Greek-Canadian and does speak some passable Greek; to be less fair, his accent sounds like a Canadian putting on a Greek accent and he’s also supposed to have been born in Yugoslavia.
If you’ve seen any other CBS procedural, you’ll have almost certainly seen something much better, from its CSI: Miami-style sci-fi screenless computer displays through to its NCIS-grade inept fight scenes. Did they really drop Limitless for this mildly blander Crossing Lines?
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