The Best Show on German Television, Found Right as It Died

I am always late. With everything. Comprehensively, across every category of existence. So of course I discovered Pixelmacher right as the channel it lived on was being shut down. ZDFkultur—the German public broadcaster’s culture offshoot, a channel that for a few years tried to be something other than crime procedurals and reality formats—went dark not long after I found it. The show went with it.

Pixelmacher covered games and internet culture in a way that somehow managed to be neither condescending nor performatively cool, which in German TV terms is roughly equivalent to achieving cold fusion. They went to Japan and made a documentary, and that episode is the one I keep going back to. It’s about the specific intensity with which Japan has always taken games and virtual culture seriously—the arcades, the rhythm games, Hatsune Miku and the entire strange world built up around a digital pop star with turquoise pigtails—and it treats all of it with genuine curiosity. No ironic distance. No tourist smirking. Just: here is this thing, look at it properly.

German television is, broadly, a catastrophe. The Pixelmacher Japan episode is what I show people when I want to explain what it could be—what it occasionally, briefly, was. I’ve thought more than once about what it would cost to run a TV channel. Probably too much. But I’d have ideas.