The Relief of Actually Good Television

There was a period when German television produced almost nothing worth staying awake for. Then Roche & Böhmermann appeared on ZDF neo—Charlotte Roche and Jan Böhmermann sitting across from each other, saying things television hosts weren’t supposed to say, in the specific way that made you feel the conversation was actually going somewhere rather than just managing the impression of going somewhere. It assumed its audience was adult in the full sense of the word.

When it came back for another season, I remember the feeling that came with the announcement. Not the mild pleasure of a show returning, but something closer to relief—the kind you feel when something good turns out not to have been a one-off, a lucky accident that got away with itself once.

Böhmermann would later become internationally notorious for a poem about the Turkish president that triggered a diplomatic incident and criminal proceedings under an obscure German statute. Roche had already written Wetlands, a novel so bluntly sexual it made booksellers in several countries visibly uncomfortable. The two of them together on a talk show was either a disaster waiting to happen or exactly what television needed.

It was, mostly, exactly what television needed.