With the large number of new releases and sequels on Netflix, Amazon and Co., it is easy to lose track. What’s worth it? What can you leave behind? Here are our recommendations for the weekend, the most interesting scene and a confession.
“Intimate” (Joyn)
Every generation has the comedians it deserves: Otto was the bourgeois fright of the seventies, the “super noses” were the nonsense of the rough eighties, the comedian scene that emerged from “Saturday Night”, commentators of the carefree nineties, Harald Schmidt the eternal idol of the People who like to say Gypsy Schnitzel and the journalists who are allowed to interview him. Hey, laugh-sticky-in-your-mouth. But now Jan Böhmermann is quite old and embittered. Let’s forget all that now and turn to the Belton twins Emil and Oskar, Bruno Alexander, Max Mattis and Leonard Fuchs, the best gag collective since “Monty Phyton”, influenced and encouraged by the great Christian Ulmen. Your “Die Discounter” is perfect, the new series “Intimate” more perfect. Although (or because) it is largely improvised, every dialogue, every scene about the six very young men is to the point. The message: There is no message. Precisely because of this: you have to see it. Peter Huth
„The Crown“ (Netflix)
“Royal visit surprised by storm – Charles the Third has to hold out in the cheese dairy”. The report of a major German daily newspaper shone on the mobile phone in a similar way on Thursday. You read them and thought: Yes! Everything about it felt right. Especially for those who have seen “The Crown” and think they know the new king and the entire British royal family intimately.
At least since the Netflix series, viewers have known about Charles’ preference for organic farming. The cheese factory also seems to fit the image of the soft, pale boy who sat so lost in a drafty boarding school in Scotland in the first season – at the request of his no less cool father. Later, of course, it’s about Diana, the love for Camilla, the divorce, the tampon scandal and waiting for the throne.
One can follow the series with the interest of a gossip magazine reader. But it would also work without big names and voyeurism. “The Crown” is not just about the madness of growing up in an institution like the British royal family, but above all about family: envy among siblings, courting for the love of parents and the inner turmoil of children of divorce. Once you start a series, you won’t get out of it that quickly. But you should pause at the latest when you are ranting about events such as King Charles’ visit to Germany as spoilers. Lena Karger
“Elementary” (Amazon Prime, Season 5)
I confess that I abuse series. As a background noise for everyday life. For cooking, clearing out the basement, for cycling on the spot under the roof. Not all series, none with any kind of artfully nested narrative strategy, of course. They must be endless. Something like “Hawaii Five-O”. Or “Elementaries”. This is the American serial derivative of Sherlock Holmes. With Johnny Lee Miller as Sherlock and Lucy Liu as Dr. Joan (!) Watson. Not worth talking about.
That means once already. The NYPD captain, whom Watson and Sherlock are advising, sits in a diner across from his future partner. But this life partnership fails him. Unaware of what is happening to him, the captain sends Watson ahead. The woman admits that she has multiple sclerosis. And then they sit there again. And she says that it’s all really terrible and she doesn’t want to expect the captain to live with her and this terrible disease.
If I see something like that, and unfortunately that doesn’t happen all that seldom, I stop cycling immediately. As the father of someone affected, MS is a shitty disease. A sword of Damocles. But as in films from MS – whose progressive forms are legion, from which everyone gets their own illness, which can be very mild, but also very horrible – how an exclusively frightening bugger is made of it is of course dramaturgically understandable. But otherwise irresponsible because it traumatizes everyone before they even have a diagnosis. Elmar Krekeler
„The Consultant“ (Amazon Prime)
Recently I sat a few seats next to Christoph Waltz at the opera and shuddered. Because the Austrian’s art is to give horror a friendly face, and that’s his own face, he wears it in front of and behind the camera and also in the audience of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. You can’t look at Waltz, watch his smile, hear his always perfectly chosen words and pleasant voice (plus that light dialect) without knowing that it will all end horribly. The series “The Consultant” is based on this – and unfortunately on this alone. After the death of a video game development prodigy, Waltz comes to his company as a consultant and is tasked with saving it. Not for a single second do you believe him to have any good motives, and finally his bizarre history (something with amputations, golden bones, Russia and bare feet) is no longer properly followed. You know how it ends: Evil outlives the evil. And that’s how it happens. The whole series is just foil for Waltz. That’s not enough, you can leave it. Peter Huth
„The Watcher“ (Netflix)
Yes, it’s not all streaming gold that American producer tycoon Ryan Murphy (from “Nip/Tuck” to “Ratched”) delivers to Netflix under a five-year, $300 million fee contract that has been running since 2018. But it shines especially through the look and the cast of the supporting roles. In “The Watcher” a picture-perfect New York family – he works in an agency, she is a ceramic artist and has two children – moves to the New Jersey countryside. They’ve poured their life savings (and a whole lot more, actually) into a gem of a historic home.
Of course, the new home soon becomes a threat. Or better yet to “The Watcher”, who sends them threatening letters, and there are always strangers in the house. It’s all done up in tantalizingly over-stylish shades of beige that you’d think the property would throw the newbies in disgust at so much unreal good taste. Of course, the family all but disintegrates in the face of this mysterious happening, and it’s a pleasure to watch Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale as Nora and Dean go through this gradual loss of face and consciousness.
But even more famous is the cast of the nice neighbors. There’s the particularly haggard Mia Farrow with pigtails and her disabled brother Terry Kinney who look like they’ve been copied directly from Grant Wood’s iconic painting American Gothic. Margo Martindale as Big Mo switches back and forth between cake-baking granny and ordinary cursing prolette. The casting bird is once again shot by supporting role queen Jennifer Coolidge (“The White Lotus”) as a greedy-bitchy real estate agent who is keen on the house, which is constantly losing value. Her Karen – who sometimes whispers, sometimes snarls – sparkles with evil eyes from between her blonde curtains of hair. And her greed drips like poisoned saliva between the permanently pulled-down corners of her mouth. Every Coolidge second is a TV highlight this time, too. Manuel Brug
