Marcel Winatschek

The Channel Is Plan B

There’s a story Etienne Gardé likes—from Jerry Seinfeld’s documentary Comedian—about a small band walking through sleet on the way to a gig, suits soaked, instruments in hand, until they spot a house in the distance. Fire going, family decorating a tree, the whole picture-book scene. They press their cold faces to the glass and stare. And one of them says, How can anyone live like that? Etienne tells this story when people ask him whether he ever thinks about doing something more sensible with his life. It’s the perfect deflection—funny, a little melancholy, and entirely sincere. The band always walks toward the gig.

I spoke with him at the end of 2014, when Game One was in its final weeks on MTV after nearly a decade on air. He and his three collaborators—Simon Krätschmer, Daniel Budimann, Nils Bomhoff—had built something genuinely unusual in German television: a gaming and pop culture show that actually felt like it was made by people who gave a damn about the audience. They’d been doing this since GIGA, a games channel that shaped a generation of German internet kids in the early 2000s. Those kids were now in their thirties, had families, and still remembered GIGA with something approaching gratitude. That kind of loyalty is not manufactured.

What killed Game One wasn’t quality—Etienne is emphatic about that, almost wounded. Rein qualitativ sind wir auf keinen Fall schlechter geworden. Eher im Gegenteil. They’d done everything asked of them: absorbed budget cuts, added web content, hit quota targets, adjusted the comedy ratio on demand. The show just got quietly bled out—moved to Comedy Central, stripped to a fortnightly slot, then cancelled. That’s not how you treat something that worked. But that’s how television treats things it doesn’t know what to do with.

The four of them had seen this coming long enough to build an exit. Rocket Beans TV, their Twitch-based 24/7 channel, launched in January 2015. The pitch was something like: MTV for nerds, except the nerds are running it. Nerd here meaning—Etienne is careful about this—not a pejorative, but a specific sensibility. People who are chronically online, pop-culturally literate, allergic to the managed blandness of mainstream German television, and old enough to remember when the internet felt like a secret rather than an infrastructure.

He and Simon had met at GIGA first, then Budi and Nils joined, and by the time Game One was up and running they’d become something closer to siblings than colleagues. Wir kennen uns in- und auswendig, jeder kennt die Stärken und Macken des anderen. He compares it to knowing exactly what someone’s about to say before they say it—and rolling your eyes anyway. The downside of working with people that long is that you can never really switch off: get them in a room and within five minutes they’re talking about what formats to make, which ideas might actually work, how to pitch it. The upside is that you trust each other in the way that only comes from ten years of shared failure and occasional success.

What they built at Rocket Beans was, by design, the opposite of the TV machine that had just discarded them. No network notes, no quota obligations, no suit in a meeting who’s proud of himself for recently discovering emoji. One of their business partners described the channel as GIGA reloaded meets Wayne’s World 2.0—anarchic, often live, frequently cardboard-and-gaffer-tape in production values, audience interaction baked in from the start. That was the GIGA DNA. The Wayne’s World part meant: low budget, improvised, free. And also: made with obvious love for the thing you’re making, which an audience will always clock even if they can’t name it.

The YouTube question came up, as it always did back then. They’d been posting there for two years, had built a real following, but Etienne was already tired of being called a YouTuber. The label felt like a category error. YouTube was just a distribution platform, same as television was a distribution platform—the content was neither. Their videos ran thirty minutes-plus, which was supposed to be suicide according to every multi-channel network advisor they’d encountered, but their audience watched anyway because the content was worth it. He had no interest in pivoting to five-minute makeup tutorials to chase the algorithm. Wir machen seit über 10 Jahren Fernsehen und von uns hat noch nicht mal einer einen Manager oder ’ne Agentur. That’s either a badge of honor or a survival strategy—probably both.

On the subject of his competition—other YouTubers, beauty vloggers, the whole machine—he was pointedly non-judgmental in a way that felt more honest than the usual mock-solidarity. Someone like Sami Slimani, Germany’s most-subscribed beauty influencer at the time and an easy target for the gaming-and-irony crowd, makes people genuinely happy, Etienne said. That’s not nothing. It’s exactly the same mechanism as boy bands: young people finding an aspirational figure and going all in. He’s old enough to be past the point where someone else’s success irritates him just because it’s not his kind of thing.

The question of money was harder. He was blunt about the math: 200,000 YouTube subscribers is an impressive number for a decade of community-building, but it doesn’t sustain a production company with actual employees. Television money was still bigger—multiples bigger—but it came with the permanent threat of cancellation and the specific humiliation of being managed by people who thought their embrace of SMS emoticons counted as digital fluency. The plan for the channel involved asking the audience to pay a small monthly amount directly, bypassing Kickstarter and Patreon partly on ideological grounds (he resented the platform cut) and partly because neither model fit what they were actually building—ongoing programming, not a one-off project or a promise-delivery treadmill.

His frustration with German media was specific and came from experience rather than pose. Every format pitch they’d taken to a major broadcaster had been more creative than anything currently on air, he said, and the people across the table would nod along and then greenlight another reality show because those hit their numbers. Dann sitzen da Leute, die sind stolz darauf, dass sie jetzt Smileys bei ihren SMS benutzen. He’s not wrong that German television has historically been conservative in a way that British or American TV hasn’t—Stefan Raab being the kind of exception that proves the rule. The public broadcasters spending mountains of license-fee money on safe, expensive mediocrity while small production companies starved for resources was a genuine grievance, not just envy.

He was also funny about it, which helped. The question of what YouTuber he’d most like to punch drew a shrug—he doesn’t think that way, he said, and then immediately suggested that Sami Slimani record a Halt die Fresse video for Aggro TV, which is a very specific German cultural joke that somehow made it funnier. His ongoing rage about his phone battery displaying 19% and then immediately dying read as the kind of impotent technological fury that the rest of the interview had built toward: a man who has spent years arguing with large institutions and won’t always—taking it out on his handset.

On the question of young people and ambition, he was uncharacteristically conservative and knew it. Ich höre mich wie ein alter Mann an, he admitted, before going ahead and saying it anyway: that the media industry was drowning in applicants who didn’t understand how stiff the competition was, that the YOLO mentality of the mid-twenties set grated on him, that he was married with a son and back pain and watching people park their cars. Midlife is a strange word for someone in their mid-thirties but the particular texture of it—the creeping awareness that the future you assumed would sort itself out is now actively arriving—comes through clearly.

What he never quite articulated but ran underneath everything was the question of legacy. GIGA, Game One, Rocket Beans—these weren’t just jobs. They were the accumulated work of people who had something to say and found a form for saying it, and who had spent years watching that form get squeezed, budget-cut, and eventually cancelled by people for whom it was always just inventory. The band analogy from Seinfeld is apt. You don’t do it for the warm house and the fire. You do it because the alternative is watching through someone else’s window.

Rocket Beans TV launched and survived. The channel is still running as of now—one of the longer-running experiments in German internet broadcasting, which is its own kind of answer to every broadcaster who passed on their format pitches. Etienne and the rest of the crew are still there. The cardboard scenery probably got better. The Wayne’s World energy, from what I can tell, did not go away.