A Year Late and Fully Documented

Cast your mind back to 2008. On reflection it wasn’t as good as it felt like it should have been—a year with maybe a handful of genuinely positive moments, most of which involved someone else doing something interesting while the rest of us watched.

One of those moments was Hannah appearing on the German reality show Mitbewohner gesucht—a flatshare-hunting format on VOX, the channel that also broadcast Gilmore Girls and The O.C. on heavy rotation, which tells you everything you need to know about the target audience. Hannah was trying to rent a room in her apartment to a woman named Linda, who came across as perfectly likeable and not at all insufferably smug. The whole thing was filmed in her immaculately clean flat, right next to the Scientology building, with Hannah in her turquoise house slippers, flanked by her attractive friends.

I sat on this clip for nearly a year—VOX had it up on their streaming service and I grabbed it with ScreenFlow before it could vanish. There’s something specific about watching someone you actually know on television. The uncanny gap between the person and the image. Hannah on screen, in her own apartment, in those slippers, already a document. A year on it feels like footage from a slightly different timeline. I still think she should have given me the room.