German Television, Against All Evidence
By the time I got around to writing about Roche & Böhmermann, everyone who mattered had already said it better and months earlier. Nilz Bokelberg had written about it. Johnny Häusler at Spreeblick had written about it. Christine Neder had written about it. In the time since those pieces ran, a dozen other formats had been born, broadcast, and cancelled. RTL had shed approximately forty-seven IQ points from its average viewer. MTV had probably aired three music videos, if it was having a good week. And meanwhile, this show kept going.
I came in through the episode where Max Herre—one of Germany’s most respected hip-hop musicians, a man with actual credibility and presumably a publicist—got annoyed enough to leave the set and go cry somewhere. Which, if you think about it, is a perfect entry point. After that I went back and watched everything in the archive, in a kind of daze. Completely gone on it. Gone on Charlotte Roche in particular, and on whatever insane logic holds the whole format together.
Charlotte Roche you may know from her novel Wetlands, which managed to be genuinely filthy and genuinely sad at the same time and sold somewhere in the millions worldwide. Jan Böhmermann was at that point still building the reputation he’d later cement—he’s since become Germany’s most important political satirist, the kind of comedian foreign governments actually file criminal complaints against. But in 2012 they were just two people on ZDFkultur, a German public digital channel with such limited reach that a significant portion of the country couldn’t even pick up the signal, doing a talk show that looked like it had been designed to fail.
And that’s exactly why it works. The set is bad. The interstitial segments are weirdly honest rather than slick. The whole thing runs counter to every assumption I have about what makes a successful show. No spectacle, no mass-market charm, no elaborate conceptual machinery. Just two hosts who seem to be figuring out what they actually think in real time, and guests who—because the format gives them no safe harbor—occasionally reveal something true about themselves.
Not always. Sometimes Böhmermann fires a joke into complete silence and the awkward pause hangs there long enough that the big censor button in the middle of the table can’t save it. Sometimes a guest sits down having clearly just received the full publicist treatment—the pre-interview pep talk, the talking points, the reassurance that this will be a normal promotional appearance—and spends the whole segment defending a version of themselves that nobody in the room believes. When the show eats those people alive, it’s usually because they earned it.
What they manage to pull off, in that terrible slot on a channel most people can’t receive, is something I had genuinely given up hoping for from German television: that somewhere between the reality docusoaps and the Scrubs reruns and the Stefan Raab memorial marathon programming, something might exist that treats its audience as adults. It makes me happy in a slightly surprised way, the way you feel when something you expected to be mediocre turns out to be the real thing.
I know I’m stating the obvious. Everyone decent already watches this. The point of writing it anyway is to reach the five or six people who haven’t found it yet—the ones still stuck in the reality-TV swamp—and drag them toward it before the whole thing gets cancelled or moved to a timeslot so bad even insomniacs miss it.