Wouldn't that just raise the threshold of your fucks-given-o-meter though and make everything else seem even more meaningless?

Okay admittedly we were (are?) a nation of nudists, no two ways about it. It's just that the Easterners loved getting naked even more. It is known. (Honestly FKK never even nearly reached the popularity in the West that it had in the East, certainly not amongst all demographics.)

Agreed. I tend not to think about it but found it very noticeable here. Oh English, why didst thou forsake so many linguistic nuances?

What is a capitalist work ethic and how is it different from a socialist work ethic?

Hm I believe the fact that it was so widespread had more to do with the secular nature of the GDR and the liberalism of the 70s onwards. Now if we're talking about the earlier roots of this culture in the 19th century and early 20th century it did have an ideological dimension though if I remember correctly, FKK fans…

Wow you did! I totally scanned the comments before I commented to see whether anyone had the same brain malfunction. This is it, I'm going to sleep.

No problem! I agree that those cultural differences are fascinating. Which reminds me that I love how so far they've featured authentic news reports quite frequently, I think it helps build the atmosphere and paranoia and also quickly illustrates how the same events were differently broadcasted.

I misread the headline as "NBC renews Aquarius for some reason".

Oh and I don't know how known this is outside of Germany but skinny dipping ("naturism" or FKK = Freikörperkultur, literally "free body culture") was very popular and common in the GDR. When I see older people naked on the beach these days I automatically assume they're from the East.

It’s late July now, so it’s been about four months since the premiere. And still no progress on Frau Rauch’s transplant.

Eight episodes, I believe.

This might be a first. I'm actually unable to find this show online, dammit! This is what it must've felt like living in the East.

Awesome. I always wanted some of that Darth Maul contour. Give me a shiny golden C3PO highlighter, a lipgloss with a frosted Hoth finish and a bronzer for a sun-kissed Tatooine tan. Give me a special edition for the special edition so I can recreate Amidala's editorial looks. Everyone needs a good white and a good red…

Yes I heard that KDD was good, unfortunately after it had already gone off the air. If they do manage to produce a gem like that, they hide it in the night slots and give it zero publicity and then when people complain about the lack of good programming they'll say "we tried! nobody wanted to watch it!".

But there's an overlap between Spiegel Online readers and pirates of good TV fiction. They completely abandoned any pretenses with their Breaking Bad episode discussions the day after an episode aired in the USA and there was no way of having legally seen it.

It's mostly a structural problem of how TV is produced here and the attitude of the kind of people in the decision making places. It certainly has absolutely nothing to do with money as they would like everyone to believe. The whole system is rotten when it comes to producing fictional formats and it's only very…

I'm honestly not that surprised. Yes, RTL is not associated with quality TV to say the least but the Öffentlich-Rechtlichen (too lazy to look this up) have been majorly behind times for a while now so I was expecting the Privatsender to make the first move. RTL has produced some event movies and TV shows with good…

It was mentioned in the press as a complete side note when a few episodes were shown at the Berlinale but that was it. At least that's the only thing I heard about it before this review popped up.

Alexander Beyer is great, I still vividly remember him from that European co-production of War and Peace a few years back.

Finally a German TV show that looks decent (and actually gives the great actors we have some material to showcase their talent… just imagine if Christoph Waltz had never been cast in Inglourious Basterds, something like this would've been a good opportunity for him which just shows how much German TV sucks otherwise).…