Selfie Soaps

RTL II decided it needed to own the youth market. The thinking was simple: kids live on YouTube and Instagram, so let’s make TV shows out of selfies. Berlyn. Mjunik. dailyCGN. Just people filming themselves on their phones for a couple minutes, which is somehow supposed to be different from actual YouTube people doing exactly that except these had corporate backing and the unmistakable stench of desperation.

The weird part was how quickly nobody wanted this. Even fans of Berlin – Tag & Nacht—a show so relentlessly stupid it should carry a warning label—couldn’t stomach it. Two of the three are already cancelled. The digital chief who championed it is gone. The third one’s probably dead too, just hasn’t admitted it yet.

There’s something sad about watching a TV network miss the entire point this completely. They saw the format and thought the format was the thing. Looked at YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and didn’t understand what was actually happening. Thought a phone camera was the secret, that you could replicate youth culture by just appending aesthetics to a corporate product.

The gap between what they thought and what was true is the whole story. You can’t copy the internet by mimicking its surface. The format was never what made it work. It was always about people who had something to say, who did it because they wanted to, not because a focus group said teenagers like phones. The energy has to be real, and a corporation can’t fake that no matter how many selfies they film.