New Year’s TV was like old year’s TV. The ARD showed a “crime scene”, the ZDF sent the “dream ship” to catch spectators. It worked. The thriller won the ratings race with 8.71 million, heart and pain in the Bahamas interested 5.51 million. Those who wanted and could could use their streaming subscription(s) instead. But also here: Same procedure as last year.
New Seasons, Prequel, Sequel
Linear and online assortments are converging. What is even easier to explain with ARD via RTL to ZDF, because here an older regular audience determines the constant offer in the “Soko” – to “Tatort” quality, must be surprising with Amazon via Netflix to Wow: the developed trend, with To want to inspire customers with innovations in the form of new seasons, prequels, sequels and spin-offs. So Ufa Fiction will explain the table round at “Dinner for one” with “Dinner for five”, “The Crown” will get a sixth season, “Walking Dead” will get a spin-off.
We viewers are thus homogenized, all the while new ideas, new stories, new formats are missing. Now it is perhaps presumptuous to elitist to constantly cry out for something new, as long as the old, the familiar, is warmly welcomed. The other, the unfamiliar thing, like the start of “Tatort” in 1970 or the innovation with “Breaking Bad” in 2008, was the beginning of new television, new seeing.
2023 is still young, the revolution in fiction can still break out in streaming and TV, at least evolution can begin. But when ZDF, after all the market leader in German television, celebrates a new season of “Soko Hamburg”, the new year of television gets its first break.
To home page
