ARD series: Fireworks of unbelievable repartee | nd-aktuell.de

Despite the fact that cynicism is rather unwelcome, it is often shown. Series from “Dallas” to “Succession” and “Yellowstone” to the Norwegian alpha animal grotesque “Exit” have established the condescending mockery of their filthy rich characters as an intangible main character.

However, this evil malice hardly sums up a fictional format as well as the ARD series “Where we are, is up”. “People always die,” says a union official, brushing off concerns that his use of care robots could cost human lives instead of saving them. A thoroughly cynical sentence – which the doubter easily surpasses. After all, their profession is seen as the epitome of servile advantage-taking at the service of the highest bidder.

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Valerie Hazard is a lobbyist, and one of the opportunistic kind. Having just moved to Berlin from Brussels, she represents the interests of the pharmaceutical industry against environmental associations or those of the neighborhood against lignite excavators for her agency Pegasus. Here the interest representative is agitating for employees, there for employers – it doesn’t matter, as long as her flag in the wind corresponds to the order.

Seen soberly, this is a good film (political satire) with a good actress (Nilam Farooq), with Wolfgang Groos (parts 1 to 4) and Matthias Koßmehl (parts 5 to 8) providing competition of identical quality. Namely Max Lentor (Helgi Schmid): just as successful, just as attractive, just as pragmatic, albeit with a philanthropic work-life balance. On behalf of ABC & Partners, the top dog goes over dead bodies in a similar way to “The New Kid in Town,” as everyone calls the new kid here. He just somehow seems to have a stronger attitude than his rival.

While Valerie reduces (or builds up) her aggression with live ammunition at the shooting range after work, has sex with two strangers after a night of partying at the club, and still makes the world worse in the morning in all its supple freshness, Max is reflective, driven by attitude. After work, he takes care of his unwanted pregnant sister (Valerie Stoll) or his own alcohol addiction, sometimes wakes up in bed with a guy, then feeds the birds and carefully takes on dubious mandates.

In addition, there is a lot of biographical ballast that the authors of head author Christian Jeltsch have written on the astral body of their male protagonist. Also thickened with lush clichés. For the showrunner, tragicomic plus model optics with competition plus personality study in the shark tank of capital city politics was apparently not enough for eight 45 minutes.

In addition, he wanted – actually quite laudably – to outline the lobby industry as a state within a state. And that’s where things get hairy. Instead of transferring the Brussels spin-doctor system of the captivating ARD comedy “Parlament” to the Berlin biotope, “Where we are, is up” fizzles out in the small and small of megalomaniac stereotypes. Max’s boss (Jan-Gregor Kremp) must therefore be a sleazebag à la Harvey Weinstein, who distributes orders in his bathrobe between the office bar and the floating pool, the fulfillment of which is then exclusively reported on by MachTV – a right-wing populist mix of RTL “Explosiv” and Fox News, which is nevertheless the leading medium for all decision-makers.

The fact that naturally enigmatic lobbyists always do their persuasion with envelopes full of bribes is just as absurd as the running joke of Valerie’s secret game of chess in the desk or the cigarette holder in Ulrike Kriener’s “Grande Dame of Pulling the Strings of the Bonn Republic” that a waiter in the “Café Einstein.” « named Albert constantly serves the hottest snacks from the rumor mill.

Such platitudes in the context of a toxic PR industry that tends to be anti-democratic are not only careless, but also extremely trivializing. And they ensure that the positive aspects of a series that was originally produced for Sky are pushed into the background.

Her sharp-tongued dialogues, for example, or Max’s creeping catharsis towards a real conscience – both burn up in the fireworks of implausible repartee and cynical clichés. “Burn-out is just the zeitgeist term for laziness,” Zickler once says to Lentor. Anyone who replaces “burn-out” with “political satire” and adds “sometimes” actually describes “Where we are is up” quite well.

Available in the ARD media library.

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