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‘Germany can’t produce a Breaking Bad’

American TV series Breaking Bad has been smashing viewing records while scooping awards. Meanwhile, Germany, unlike its European neighbours, has not produced a globally successful show for 25 years. Alex Evans finds out why.

Published: 15 October 2013 16:18 CEST
'Germany can't produce a Breaking Bad'
Photo: DPA

In a roundup of 12 of the world's best TV series, Germany's top-selling daily newspaper the Bild did not place a single home-grown series in its list.

All but one spot went to American and British shows such as Homeland, Downton Abbey and, of course, Breaking Bad.

Critics and viewers have enjoyed a glut of high quality programmes in recent years, not just from the US and UK but from around Europe, among them gritty crime dramas Spiral from France, Sweden's Wallander, and The Killing from Denmark.

So how is it that Germany, Europe's most powerful economy and a country renowned for its cultural prowess, has not exported a successful TV series for a quarter of a century?

Their last truly internationally successful programme could shed some light on the answer.

The last taste of global success German TV had was the cop drama Derrick, which ran 281 episodes from 1973 to 1998 and was exported to over 100 countries.

But despite its success, Derrick was hardly renowned for its outstanding dramatic quality. Thinker and critic Umberto Eco used the series for a book called Derrick or a Passion for Mediocrity in 2000.

And the series which do well in the country now are not breaking any new ground in terms of dramatic merit, with the ratings dominated by Germany's perennial cheap soap operas and police action shows.

The “mediocrity” that Eco saw in Derrick is still plaguing the industry, it seems.

Uwe Mantel, from the media magazine DWDL, told The Local that the dominance of the two state-financed TV networks contributed to the dearth of high-quality programming in Germany.

“When you look at the German market, it's basically just ARD and ZDF that make the programmes,” he said, “ZDF mostly just make crime shows, and the ARD have a lot of low budget programmes.”

“RTL and Sat1 make a few,” Mantel added, mentioning the popular RTL action series “Alarm for Cobra 11: The Motorway Police”, whose own web page summarizes it as “full of action and fast cars.”

But the most popular German shows are all made by the “big two” networks.

 

According to DWDL's ratings report for 2012, the top ten most-watched series were all produced by either ARD or ZDF. The list was topped by ARD's For Heaven's Sake, a series about Bavarian nuns trying to stop their monastery being demolished.

And soap operas, such as the infamous Good Times, Bad Times, consistently score highly in the ratings. “They have a big audience, but mostly it's a very old audience,” said Mantel.

But Germany has a big problem with selling its shows abroad. “The TV series culture here is not working. There's not much that's exportable, because there isn't much that can even stand on its own two feet here in Germany,” Mantel said.

There are exceptions to the low-quality norm, however. ARD's Weissensee, a family drama set in communist East Berlin in the 1980s, has straddled the border between critical success and viewing figures better than most.

The first episode of the second series was watched by 5.24 million viewers, a result that would make Weissensee a competitor with the top ten series, if the high-budget, high-quality drama can keep up its ratings.

Despite a long absence from screens and the confusing release of the second series on DVD before it was even broadcast, the series' “superb cast and fresh dramatic style” does it credit, according to TV critic website Serienjunkies.de.

The website hailed the first series as “evidence that it pays to invest in the quality of German series.”

But watching one episode of Good Times, Bad Times should rid anyone of the belief in the website's 2010 claim that Weissensee heralded a “minor renaissance” in German television.

READ MORE: British family goes native in Germany for TV show

Alex Evans

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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