Every Monday the ZDF public television service broadcasts a crime story, comedy or drama as its Television Movie of the Week. On Tuesdays SAT.1, a commercial station, broadcasts internally produced movies: not just romantic comedies, but occasionally also films like Die Hitzewelle (The Heatwave), in which the Ruhr District suffers a severe drought as a result of climate change. Every Wednesday, unless the German national football team are playing, the ARD, the main public-service network, covers a broad range of subjects – from problems such as juvenile violence and alcoholism to film adaptations like Das Feuerschiff (The Lightship). Sometimes on Thursdays and always on Fridays, on the other hand, the ARD relies on lighter entertainment. On Saturdays, the ProSieben commercial station often broadcasts internally produced movies for young audiences, while the ZDF prefers to show crime thrillers. On Sundays, the ZDF again turns to lighter entertainment such as movies based on books by the British author Rosamunde Pilcher – thereby offering a distinct contrast to the Tatort (Crime Scene) whodunit usually shown on the ARD at the same time.
This is what appears on German TV screens at the 8:15 p.m. peak viewing slot week by week. It adds up to more than 200 German TV movie productions a year. According to an industry rule of thumb, a 90-minute film costs roughly 1.2 million euros. Elaborate production and the high quality of German TV movies is also making them increasingly popular with foreign stations. At Mipcom in Cannes, the world’s largest television fair, for example, SevenOne International, the export company of ProSiebenSat1 AG, was able to sell Der Abgrund – eine Stadt stürzt ein (Gaping Abyss) to 40 countries from France to Thailand and the remake of Bernhard Wicki’s anti-war classic Die Brücke (The Bridge) with Franka Potente (Run Lola Run) to 25 countries.
German public-service broadcasters even present their productions at their own annual fair, German Screenings. The event, which is organized by ARD sales subsidiaries German United Distributors and Telepool, is attended by some 200 international buyers. That explains not only why the telenovela Sturm der Liebe is a hit in Italy, but also why the innovative German science programme Wissen macht Ah! is well-received in Russia. In any event, Tatort (Crime Scene) is a major export success – these crime thrillers are sold to some 40 different countries.
The impressive tradition of German TV movies is also best illustrated by these Sunday evening crime thrillers. Since 1970 the Tatort series has been based on the principle of allowing detectives in different cities between Kiel and Munich to solve a case. In the process it also holds up a mirror to Germany’s federalist system. The series’ 700th movie was celebrated in May 2008. Viewing figures hover around the 10 million mark, including a large number of young people who otherwise tend to prefer the commercial stations. What is more they are often followed by debates in the press and on the Internet – about the quality of individual films, about violent scenes, about controversial subjects like euthanasia or “honour killings”. Tatort plots frequently reflect the latest developments in society. Investigations by 7 of the 15 Tatort teams are now led by female detectives. And even before the Greens became the first German political part to elect a chairman of Turkish origin with Cem Özdemir, the first ethnic Turkish Tatort hero appeared on TV screens for the first time in October 2008 as Chief Inspector Cenk Batu (played by Mehmet Kurtulus) of the Hamburg police.
The significance of TV movies as an major element in the programming of all major German stations has a great deal to do with the dual television system. When the privately owned commercial stations that were founded in the 1980s began to take off, their TV movies vied for attention with sensational stories and brought genres like action thrillers and fantasy back into television. The public-service networks reacted to this development and lively competition has continued until the present. In 2008, the owners of ProSiebenSat.1, private investment firms KKR and Permira, had to face a lot criticism because they burdened the network with considerable debts and made cuts in programming. However, no cuts were made in TV movies. Sat.1 even increased its production from 20 to 30 TV movies a year.
Its main competitor RTL relies more on international entertainment formats like Deutschland sucht den Superstar, the German version of Pop Idol, which are far cheaper to produce. However, RTL recently increased its production of particularly elaborate movies like Die Jagd nach dem Schatz der Nibelungen. These “TV events” constitute a specifically German television genre and are also considered successful exports because of their high production value. Ever since the success of the Sat.1 two-part movie Der Tunnel (2001), which is about an escape under the Berlin Wall, all the big stations have been competing with spectacular productions that often combine events in recent history with melodramatic storylines. In 2005/06, Nico Hofmann, the producer of Der Tunnel, completed three two-parters in the course of just a few months. Die Luftbrücke (Sat.1) is set against the background of the Red Army blockade of West Berlin in 1948. Die Sturmflut (RTL) is a love story that takes places during the dramatic events of the 1962 Hamburg flood. In Dresden (ZDF) a nurse who is engaged to a senior physician falls in love with a shot-down British pilot and they get caught up in the bombing of the city by the Royal Air Force in 1945. This film was seen be more than 12 million viewers in Germany and has been sold to networks in more than 60 countries.
In the meantime the range of subjects covered by these TV movie productions stretches from the scandal surrounding the drug Contergan (Thalidomide), which director Adolf Winkelmann dramatized for the ARD, to the fall of the Berlin Wall (Wir sind das Volk, Sat.1; Das Wunder von Berlin, ZDF). Recently the trend has also broadened into the scientific field and possible disasters such as tornados over Berlin and volcanic eruptions in the Eifel mountains. The stations would seem to regard these movie “events” as an appropriate means of competing for viewers and against the Internet. As always, however, success brings its own problems. Television is almost producing too many movies to show them all properly. This impression would seem justified in the face of the Kleine Fernsehspiel drama series on the ZDF. Established in 1963, the series has supported most successful German filmmakers – from Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Fatih Akin – early in their careers and continues to show ambitious new films every week – be it only on Mondays starting at midnight. In fact, it’s a good reason for having a video recorder.
