Television in Germany is currently undergoing a fundamental change—one that looks like it will continue for the foreseeable. This book has addressed this time of transformation in the digital age by looking at the phenomenon of the quality TV drama, and especially at its writing and narrative styles. In doing so, I have deliberately considered quality TV—which is difficult to define, in any case—less in the sense of aesthetically and narratively “good” programmes and more as a discursive construct. In this mode, the study has analysed how the interviewed and observed practitioners negotiated, tested and reflected on German quality TV drama and, through it, broader transformations in the television industry: its programmes, their contents and their forms; its distribution and reception models and methods; and its production practices, including screenwriting, which is this study’s focus and which determined the research perspective. The analysis of the TV professionals from the perspective of media industry studies and screenwriting research revealed extremely differentiated ways of perceiving German TV drama, and especially the aforementioned upheavals as well as the sustainability of older television structures. Some practitioners positioned themselves, for example, on the side of the new, online-based streaming providers, while others argued that the “solid, old German television” (interview with Hess 2019) is still holding on and emphasised the importance of the historically established structures. These structures include standardised broadcast slots and the continuously shown, financially lucrative and therefore still significant “bread-and-butter series” such as Großstadtrevier/Big City Police Station (ARD/NDR,1986–), a long-running light crime procedural on the day-to-day cases at a fictional police station in Hamburg. These entrenched structures, underlined by the TV professionals through such examples, are not obsolete per se. Rather, the current shape of television is partly explained by the winding paths of this history, as Ralf Adelmann et al. (2001, 205) stated more than 20 years ago in their foundational German-language anthology of television studies texts.

Therefore, it would be short-sighted to proclaim a completely new television of the digital age, suggesting that the increased number of quality or “high-end” serials from Germany, accompanied by a clear focus on online distribution, exist in a dichotomy with the television from the “old” models. In addition to the definitely extant tradition of ongoing serials in the German television industry, it is also important to consider that, in general, “television” has never represented a coherent entity but has always been characterised by renewals in every phase of its development. “Post-network television” does not displace “old forms of television”; rather it “re-articulates already existing topics, problematizations, or supposed ‘potentials’ with different emphases and strategies”, Judith Keilbach and Markus Stauff (2013, 92) highlight. Applied to television fiction in Germany, this means that there is currently not only one linear developmental path away from the single work, usually taking the form of the television film or the case-per-week procedural, and heading towards the (supposed) quality serial, with its cross-episode story arcs and a focus on online distribution. The television film and its associated film-series hybrid (the so-called Reihe) remain influential and robust in this country, both for many practitioners and their ways of working and for audiences and their preferences. And yet seriality—a guiding concept and aesthetic principle of television (see Fahle and Engell 2006, 11)—plays an extremely crucial role in the current transformations. In productions for online distribution, which continues to gain importance, the emphasis is on serial formats, and central changes in screenwriting and production methods are clearly motivated by this stronger serialisation. One indication of this connection between seriality and changed modes of writing and producing is the growing relevance of the showrunner. Discussed in detail in Chapter 8, the showrunner combines the functions of scriptwriter and producer and is thus supposed to ensure a singular or “one vision” (Redvall 2013, 107) among numerous participants in serial production, and thus the series’ coherence across episodes. This striving for a singular vision adheres to the basic assumption—which can be found again and again in the industry—that production methods and cultures decisively pre-structure and shape the programmes themselves.

Both sides of this equation—the television product, including its contents and forms, and the production modes and processes, including the key stage of screenwriting—formed the central focal points of the examined industry discourse on the German quality TV drama. The following pages summarise the results of the analysis in relation to: the transformations of the television industry and especially its forms of financing; distribution, with the increase in online streaming; changed modes of reception and their analysis and conceptualisation within the industry; and the changes in production cultures and screenwriting. In the final section, I venture an outlook on the future of television in Germany in a “society of singularities” (Reckwitz 2018, 2020b).

9.1 Transformation of the Television Industry

The year 2015 marked a “pivot point for quality drama” (Eichner 2021, 205) from Germany. Most prevalently, we began to see changes through the initiation of fiction production in the pay TV sector and exports to English-speaking countries. Here, the period drama Deutschland 83 (RTL, 2015) acted as a gamechanger (see Krauß 2020f), and it therefore forms the beginning of this study’s period of investigation. Since then, the local television industry has expanded and transformed considerably. Several new commissioners and distributors for drama series have emerged, especially in the interlinked areas of pay TV and subscription video-on-demand (SVoD). Chapter 4 provided a basic introduction to this expanded and diversified television series landscape. Looking at various broadcasters, platforms and production companies, as well as different areas of series production, showed how there is neither one form of “German television” nor a singular approach to the German quality drama more specifically. However, as a decisive difference to the US television industry—the context in which “quality TV” was first spoken of (Feuer 2007, 147) and to which the bulk of academic discussions of such serials refer (e.g. McCabe and Akass 2007a; Thompson 1996)—it can be stated that the production landscape in Germany is much more strongly shaped by public-service broadcasters. ARD and ZDF still represent the most active and financially strong commissioners. However, the public media institutions, which are highly complex, diverse and bureaucratised entities, repeatedly face demands for leaner structures and more “modern” production and distribution channels (e.g. Mantel 2020)—and not only since the great media attention given to the “Schlesinger affair” surrounding the director (Intendantin) of the ARD broadcaster RBB, who resigned in 2022 due to accusations of nepotism. The public broadcasters are undergoing fundamental changes against a backdrop of new media policy demands and the ever-changing digital media environment. The advertising-financed commercial broadcasters—which for years formed one-half of Germany’s “dual broadcasting system” (Duales Rundfunksystem) (Hickethier 1998, 422–424)—are also reorienting themselves. These processes of upheaval are particularly visible in quality drama projects. Germany’s established programme providers are relying heavily on online distribution for these series, while the commercial broadcasters are trying out new business models, as the previous ones have come under considerable pressure.

Chapter 5 offered a closer look at the expanded forms of series financing and distribution and thus took into account how the practitioners’ negotiations on the quality TV drama and its screenwriting repeatedly revolved around economic questions. This attention to finances is hardly surprising, because despite all the differences found among quality or high-end dramas, they all share at least one central tendency: higher budgets. In order to support these higher costs, new cooperative ventures in production and distribution are forming, further diversifying Germany’s TV series landscape, including partnerships across channels or platforms and countries. Film and media funding bodies—which in Germany are highly federally structured—as well as larger production companies are also increasingly involved in financing the writing of series and their later production. In general, the relationship between production companies and the programme providers who commission them is changing. At the same time as there has been a shift away from one broadcaster supplying 100% of the financing (which was dominant for a long time) and the associated “total buyout” model (according to which all rights are transferred to this commissioner [Fröhlich 2010, 123]), a simultaneous development towards this arrangement, or even a kind of studio model, has occurred. Under this model, platforms such as Netflix take over considerable parts of the production alongside all distribution chains and bind writers and other creatives exclusively to themselves. In any case, one thing is certain: in Germany’s diversified television market, there is no one approach to realising quality TV drama from an economic point of view.

When it comes to series financing as well as certain other respects, fundamental changes in the heterogeneous “German television” are also evident in the fact that it increasingly bears transnational traits. Particularly in the quality or “high-end” drama segment, the transformation of television “from a national, largely broadcasting, market to a transnational multiplatform market” (Turner 2018, 137) is becoming apparent, as can likewise be observed in many other countries at present. However, the practitioners’ discussions about German quality TV drama studied here, as well as the observed economic networks of individual series projects, simultaneously underline that the national and the local remain significant. National and local aspects interact with transnational or global ones, similar to what general theoretical debates on this topic have repeatedly established (e.g. Hansen 2020), which is why the German quality TV drama and the industry behind it can ultimately be classified as “glocal”—that is, as equally local and global (Robertson 2014). The parallel significance of locality and globality also characterises distribution, which was a central point of reference in the studied industry discourse and where the current phase of upheaval in television is particularly visible.

9.2 Transformation of Distribution

In the period under investigation—that is, since 2015—the area of “internet-distributed television”, as Amanda D. Lotz (2017) calls it in her book Portals, has undeniably gained in importance in Germany. While in the earliest of my surveys producers still classified online distribution as a means of advertising the linear broadcast and therefore ultimately subordinate to it, numerous series productions from Germany are now mainly or even exclusively distributed via online streaming, without a fixed broadcast slot. In the context of Germany, too, internet distribution is not a uniform phenomenon but rather encompasses very different programmes, practices and institutions.

Netflix is by no means the only manifestation of online distribution, although it is a particularly influential and probably the best-known platform. This high-profile and aggressive SVoD provider, which has been available in Germany since September 2014, has intensified the local industry’s transnationalisation, as it usually releases its commissioned productions, including German original dramas such as Dark (2017–2020), 1899 (2022) and Liebes Kind/Dear Child (2023), ad hoc in numerous countries (see also Afilipoaie, Iordache and Raats 2021). For Germany’s TV professionals, this presents a scenario that is both appealing and threatening. On the one hand, they can potentially considerably expand their work’s exposure and reach previously untapped, and even very specific, audiences in a wide range of countries. Banded together, niche audiences may form a relevant aggregate, which means that even content that is rather specialised can prove economically viable (Hennings 2020a). On the other hand, additional income from foreign sales and licencing threatens to disappear, since Netflix, despite its transnational operations, likes to pay only “local prices”, as some producers (e.g. in Fey et al. 2020) criticised. Against this backdrop, this streaming provider of US origin is increasingly coming up against criticism in the German television and film industry. Some writers and other TV creators may still consider their first Netflix drama as a “knighthood” (Zarges 2021c, my translation), but more and more, the realisation that this commissioner does not necessarily guarantee quality or global success is sinking in. In the large online programme range of streaming providers like Netflix, only a few international, non-English-language series, such as Dark, have managed to generate transnational attention. Many SVoD providers are therefore returning focus to national or at least German-speaking audiences—as Benjamin Harris (2022), from Netflix Germany, also admitted in our interview—and are thus beginning to apply much more conservative selection criteria, which is something that TV professionals at the 2023 Berlinale Series Market noted (Berry et al. 2023; see also Krauß 2023e).

Nevertheless, the degree and success of transnational distribution are increasingly becoming a decisive evaluation criterion in the German TV industry, upon which the level of economic commitment, initial greenlighting or series continuation may depend. For practitioners, the possible demand for “international appeal” (Eichner 2021, 191) is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it makes room for different content and narratives than in a market oriented solely towards German-speaking viewers, who are used to the historically evolved broadcast slots and formats; on the other hand, the demand potentially means additional pressure and stress or could lead to decision-making dilemmas if producers want the local and linear broadcast to succeed at the same time. Editors in public-service broadcasting in particular addressed a gap between series that fit established German broadcast slots and those distributed transnationally and online. For all the tendency towards niche or quality production for online and transnational distribution, commissioners in Germany often still harbour a “desire for a campfire”, as scriptwriter Bernd Lange (2018) put it—that is to say, the famous bonfire around which the national television audience gathers. The insistence to consider national broadcast slots and ratings that emerge here can be classified as conservatism, a quality often attributed to the local television industry (Eichner 2021, 191). However, this orientation is also based on market research that found viewers still watch a considerable amount of linear television (e.g. Hess and Müller 2022, 419). Another aspect that should not be neglected is certainly that linear distribution still represents a reasonably reliable, profitable and transparent framework for practitioners, according to which, for example, they are remunerated for repeat broadcasts and can more reliably track how many viewers their production reached than with transnational streaming providers.

In the practices and negotiations of television practitioners, both forms of distribution, linear and non-linear, are ultimately closely connected, such that maintaining the dichotomy between them that some researchers and producers have invoked appears questionable. Often (but not always) the series successful on linear television are also the ones popular on streaming services. However, some dramas—such as daily and weekly soap operas, which are very much integrated into daily broadcast slots and viewers’ personal routines—might not work in non-linear digital contexts in the same way. Online distribution has also had an effect on linear broadcast slots, which are increasingly orienting towards serial content that also works online (as in the case of the Wednesday TV film schedule of ARD’s national channel Das Erste (The First), which now often supports the linear programming of miniseries). The impact of digital distribution on linear television is especially visible in event programming, where episodes are broadcast within a few days or hours, enabling a kind of “binge watching” in the context of linear broadcasting. The industry discourse on quality series from Germany repeatedly revolved around such forms of linear distribution and also attributed the (supposed) failure of some quality TV projects to the programming conventions there.

A more far-reaching transformation of distribution—which is not only about moving away from fixed broadcast slots but also focused on bringing together different media texts in the sense of “transmedia world-building” (Ryan 2015, 5, emphasis in original)—played only a marginal role in the analysed industry discourse on German quality TV drama. While practitioners dealt with feedback and marketing on social media, they rarely explored deeper cross-platform storytelling (motivated less by marketing than by narration), presumably because of the finding, mentioned in industry presentations, that transmedia projects require considerable additional human and financial resources and that only a few viewers ultimately actively participate (e.g. Wouda 2016). The industry’s initial euphoria around transmedia narration gave way to a certain scepticism in the course of the 2010s.

Among the 13 case studies used to acquire interview partners for this production study, the German youth series DRUCK/SKAM Germany (Funk/ZDF, 2018–) and its Norwegian original, SKAM (NRK, 2015–2017), which has been adapted in various countries, show promising ways to distribute and narrate in a transmedial way.1 For DRUCK, as for SKAM, scenes and sequences were shared online precisely when they took place in the fictional world of the plot and only later were they compressed into series episodes every Friday, all of which also remained accessible after the fact. Thus, a linear, or at least weekly, distribution and an asynchronous “binge watching” option were combined and extended by the “real-time” social media approach (Krauß and Stock 2021, 414). The fictional protagonists’ activities on social media reinforce this real-time impression and further narrate storylines and characters.

It remains to be seen whether the German television industry will launch further such transmedia productions in its efforts to increase the quality of and rejuvenate TV drama. For commercial providers, it can be difficult to make content available for free on external channels, as was done for DRUCK by its central commissioner Funk (ARD and ZDF’s shared online content network). Barriers arise from the providers’ dependence on revenue from advertising, subscriptions or both as well as their vested interest in their own “exclusive” programmes, especially in the case of subscription services. Public television is more flexible in this regard, but it is in danger of losing its brand recognition if—as in the case of Funk—it takes place almost exclusively on external platforms such as YouTube and Instagram. The content is also necessarily submitted to the commercial logics found there. Sven Stollfuß consequently sees the concept of “public value”—that is, the society-oriented mission of public broadcasters—as being at risk:

Platforms that are run by corporations whose business model establishes and consolidates forms of communication and algorithmically prefigured information and data processing […] are changing the conditions of democratic societies in the digital age. (2021, 131)

Television’s transformation at the level of distribution—which is particularly evident in the case of quality series that are strongly distributed online—is in no small part connected to more general social changes. The practitioners repeatedly dealt with sociopolitical relevance in a transforming society, especially in respect to content. The “relevant” stories highlighted by them as a criterion of quality should be further studied, particularly in terms of how this relevance is to be thought of in the digital distribution environment. How can television and its expansions, especially regarding the public-service providers, continue to be relevant or be relevant again and constructively contribute to democratic society in the digital age, as mentioned by Stollfuß? The Public Service Media and Public Service Internet Manifesto, published in 2021 (Fuchs and Unterberger 2021), called for the creation of a public-service internet and the reinvigoration of public-service broadcasting. Drama series that address viewers not as customers or as data mines but as citizens and that have the social relevance mentioned by the practitioners could be part of this vision.

The manifesto identifies data protection as a core area of the proposed public-service internet: “Public service internet platforms minimise and decentralise data storage and have no need to monetise and monitor internet use” (Fuchs and Unterberger 2021, 5). In the researched industry discourse on German quality TV drama, with its focus on textual characteristics and production and screenwriting cultures, such positions were hardly found, as the topic of datafication generally was not of great importance. However, it is certainly true that data generation, algorithms, automation and artificial intelligence are playing an increasingly important role in contemporary hybrid television, including series from Germany. Linked to distribution, reception—including the television industry’s monitoring of this data—is undergoing a fundamental change.

9.3 Transformation of Reception and Its Capture

Although this study focuses on production, the researched industry discourse on the quality TV drama also repeatedly dealt with reception and its transformation. The “situational integration” of viewers in their “individual domestic environment” and “in a larger social framework” as well as their “apparative arrangement” vis-à-vis the television set—which the German media scholar Knut Hickethier (1995, 69, my translations) speaks of in his model Dispositiv Fernsehen (dispositif television), proposed more than 25 years ago—have taken on a more diverse, more flexible and more mobile character during the period under investigation. At the same time, the relationship between viewers and the television industry and its practitioners has also changed, especially because, in the digital media environment, comprehensive data on viewer behaviour is collected and content tends to become more target group specific.

Thanks to online distribution, audiences have access to a wide range of content at any time, freed from fixed broadcast slots. When it comes to this online content, especially series, episodes and seasons carry particular importance. In view of the flood of TV dramas, broadcasters and platforms as well as creators face a greater battle when it comes to reaching and retaining an audience. Following Andreas Reckwitz (2018, 238), this challenge can be seen as an expression of our “society of singularities”, whose “cultural machine” (Kulturmaschine) generally produces a structural asymmetry between an extreme overproduction of cultural formats (and information) and a scarcity of users’ attention. The desire found in the industry and among screenwriters to have their programmes stand out from the crowd through producing quality dramas, as well as to bind viewers over a longer period of time through serial storytelling, must be understood against this market-related and social background.

An increased commitment to series may also be motivated by the fact that this format allows creators to respond to audience behaviour data and feedback through adjusting aspects of the programme; a single, already completed film, by contrast, allows no such adjustment. This motivation is not new, nor is the more general aim of the television industry to track and control viewers and their behaviour. Already in the early 1990s, Ien Ang (1991) systematically identified how broadcasters sought to reinforce and renew people’s desire to watch television. Today, data and algorithms offer unprecedented insights into viewers’ activities. However, audiences are at risk of being under permanent observation and becoming “transparent”, which is a problematic scenario for democratic societies that rely on private spaces for opinion formation (see Zuboff 2019). On the other hand, when it comes to assessing programmes—around which the practitioners’ negotiations on the German quality TV drama inevitably revolved—digital distribution and reception practices also create the potential for audiences to participate in an open critical discourse on quality as well as the society-oriented mission of public-service broadcasters, as Uwe Kammann, Katrin Jurkuhn and Fritz Wolf (2007, 14) hoped for several years ago. When it comes to viewers’ involvement in fictional series, and more generally their participation in current digital television and the public-service media of the future, there certainly remains considerable need for both action and research.

So far, data on viewers seems to have had little bearing on the development and production processes of TV drama in Germany.2 In the case of the high-end dramas considered in this study, it is certainly relevant that such series usually consist of relatively few episodes (often only six), which are developed, written and then produced in one unified process. Changes to the plot, casting or other aspects on the basis of viewer data obtained at the distribution phase are difficult to accommodate within this process and are also not planned for. A look at individual “project networks” (Sydow and Windeler 2001) and “screen idea work groups” (Macdonald 2010)—the collaborative models of series production central to this study—also reveals how knowledge about viewers can be distributed very unevenly between the individual actors of commissioning platform or broadcaster, production company and, lastly, freelance creatives such as screenwriters. The digital divide that Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford (2011) predicted in their Six Provocations for Big Data, born of varying access to digital devices and data, can therefore also be discussed in terms of series production in Germany. Especially the relatively young streaming providers, which like to be associated with quality content, often represent a “black box” even for central production participants: they grant access to their data only partially at best, and usually only to particularly important management personnel, as they tend to operate under “anti-transparency policies” (Wayne 2021, 17).

It should also be noted that these SVoD platforms tend to present themselves as particularly innovative by publicly claiming to have elaborate data at their disposal that they can use in a targeted manner. However, “Netflix tends to do more talking about data, rather than using them for real”, the producer Georg Ramme (quoted in Abbatescianni 2021) stated at the Let’s Talk Screenwriting! online panel hosted by Utrecht University. Ramme also addressed the danger that very comprehensive data can lead to over-formalisation, ultimately resulting in boring programmes. Formatting and formulas were, as explained in Chapter 7, also central to the practitioners’ discourse on quality drama and were particularly problematised in relation to current and past television fiction from Germany. So far, however, practitioners have associated formatting and formulaicness less with algorithms and SVoD providers than with linear television’s modes of reception and distribution, especially the traditional broadcast slots and the quantitative audience ratings to be achieved there.

Ratings—a common subject of critical public debate (e.g. Seidl 2014)—pervade the industry’s negotiations on quality series, although it has been acknowledged that the digital age requires different measures and evaluation criteria. Quantitative audience figures are by no means obsolete, including for online content, but the German TV industry is increasingly realising that it is not forward-looking to focus solely on the highest possible numbers or on the frequent and regular viewers of linear broadcasts. Although these “TV patrons” ensure high ratings, they may also form the “already dying clientele of the uninterested”, as screenwriter Hanno Hackfort (in Hackfort, Konrad and Kropf 2018) exaggeratedly put it. TV ratings measurements have already been adjusted to fit the changing distribution modes; for example, the market research company GfK, which monitors these numbers in Germany, now also surveys streaming service use through its “SVOD Tracker” (Zarges 2019). The observed and interviewed practitioners emphasised the increasing relevance of non-linear reception especially for the series segment.

A more complex and diverse measurement and evaluation of audience response are linked not only to the different forms of distribution but also to the diversification of the television series landscape and its business models. In the pay TV sector, which has become more important and is particularly influential for the high-end segment, the TV professionals, according to their self-reflections at industry workshops (e.g. Root et al. 2020), also used evaluative criteria other than ratings—for example, awards and thus the critical reception of a series—because high viewer numbers do not necessarily result in more subscribers. In the case of streaming providers that, for example, use algorithms to compile their programmes, the former battle for high ratings has clearly turned into a competition to secure customer data (see Hennig-Thurau et al. 2019, 18). However, doubts around algorithms and data generation have also been raised in the industry, for example, when Soumya Sriraman (in Tereszkiewicz et al. 2020), then CEO of the British streaming provider BritBox, questioned at the 2020 Berlinale Series Market whether reception could be controlled via personalised content and called for a return to the “basics”. Such basics could include quantitative ratings. Does this mean we will see an accompanying stronger focus on quantitative viewing figures? In the case of the major transnational streaming providers Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, we can at least more recently observe, including with their original German-language productions, an orientation more towards the mainstream than the artistic niche that quality TV was once associated with. Quantitative audience numbers therefore will still play—or will again play—an important role in future, hybrid and online-based television in the digital age.

In the researched industry discourse, the significance of audience ratings is also tied to negotiations about past viewer response and conceptions of the audience. On the one hand, practitioners discussed whether and why attempts at quality TV dramas from Germany, such as Deutschland 83, Im Angesicht des Verbrechens/In the Face of Crime (ARD et al., 2010) and Die Stadt und die Macht/The City and the Power (ARD/NDR/Degeto, 2016), had failed in respect to quantitative ratings, and thus conducted a kind of “failure studies” (Redvall 2023). On the other hand, television professionals primarily attributed deficiencies in the dramaturgical quality of German series, including abbreviated and formulaic narratives, to a ratings orientation. They especially criticised the public broadcasters, which they suggested could afford to use different evaluation parameters than the advertising-financed private broadcasters because of their fee income. In connection with the supposed fixation on quantitative viewing figures, the practitioners also addressed the lopsided socialisation of the industry and the audience, which ultimately prevented or made quality series more difficult to develop. Linked to the assumption that audience tastes have been shaped by existing programmes is the discussion around the extent to which audiences can be “educated”. In the documentary film Es werde Stadt!/It Will Be a City! (WDR et al., 2013–2014), a critical review of the state of German television fiction in 2013 and 2014, Barbara Buhl, the former fiction head of the TV film and cinema programme group at WDR (ARD’s biggest local broadcaster), speaks of a reciprocal relationship: “The audience is the way we made it ourselves, but we are also the way the audience wants us to be. Of course we want to be liked”.

However, it appears many viewers no longer like the majority of German series. Or at least several of the practitioners assumed as much, based on television criticism and concrete feedback from audiences. In fact, the interviewed and observed television professionals repeatedly dealt with the “bad image” of German television productions. They also frequently discussed how to reach or win back lost and especially younger viewers. Questions of rejuvenation and “youthification” (Sundet 2021, 146)—not only in terms of reception but also at the levels of representation, distribution, screenwriting and production—generally played an important role in the practitioners’ debates. In recent years, various youth series from Germany have appeared alongside (and not necessarily in line with) dedicated quality projects, such as the exemplary DRUCK, the German SKAM adaptation; How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) (2019–), a Netflix comedy about a high school student starting an online drug business; and Wir sind jetzt/We Are Now (RTL+, 2019–), a youth drama about a teenage love triangle. Such programmes, which respond to the renaissance of serial teen TV dramas in the US as well as in other markets, especially through the streaming service Netflix (see Krauß and Stock 2020, 17–20), are largely the responsibility of young producers and also integrate social media to varying degrees in both their distribution and at the level of plot and visual aesthetic. How successful and formative such rejuvenation attempts are for the local industry will require more detailed analysis in the future. Presumably, in the course of the shift towards teen TV and younger audiences, the role of viewers will also continue to change, due to factors such as transmedia options primarily aimed at mobile use, circulation on various platforms and the integration of social media. Is the audience—or at least a small, particularly dedicated minority of fans—now becoming more interactive? Such a transformation has been repeatedly noted and hoped for in treatments of transmedia storytelling (see e.g. Jenkins 2006, 246) and also predicted by Jörg Sydow and Arnold Windeler (2004b, 4) in their early study of series production using the organisational form of the project network. In any case, in the digital media environment, the degree and characteristics of audience activity can become further criteria for judging series’ success. Linked to the viewers’ position and its analysis, production practices are likewise being transformed, which the present study has examined primarily in relation to screenwriting.

9.4 Transformation of Production Cultures and Practices

Changes in TV drama production in Germany are particularly noticeable in the work of screenwriters and their involvement in project networks and screen idea work groups. Writers increasingly develop plots and scripts collectively in the so-called writers’ room, albeit often only in a rudimentary form and adapted to the different production cultures and limited economic resources of Germany’s industry. At the same time, and as in other European markets (see Barra and Scaglioni 2021b, 17–21), many projects have turned to working with a showrunner—the hybrid writer-producer figure—as the central executive in TV series production. In a similar vein, at least a few prominent writers in Germany have taken on some production tasks, for example by acting as creative producers and being involved in decision-making processes such as casting and rough cut approval. Still, their agency continues to be discussed and negotiated in individual projects. Directors often maintain a central position that may be superior to that of the writers.

In addition to the complicated relationship between writers and directors, the influence of commissioning editors was a central issue for the practitioners when exploring the production modes of quality TV drama. The interviewed and observed television professionals often pleaded for greater autonomy for the writer in relation to the staff of broadcasters and platforms, and they problematised the large number of editors operating in the complex, bureaucratic public-service institutions. The role of these editors—as the practitioners’ discussions revealed—is likewise transforming in the changed media environment. For example, editors no longer necessarily or solely manage the linear broadcast slots and their programme contents and tonalities. As selectors of scripts and pitch papers and as translators between the various economic and artistic parties (Conor 2014, 74), editors also will have a part to play in the future television practices that may develop, such as integrating the data obtained via online distribution or artificial intelligence tools into the screenwriting process (see Keilbach and Surma 2022). These transformations of screenwriting and the involvement of commissioning editors and producers will require more detailed research in the future. If writers continue to increasingly insist on artistic autonomy and agency, it can be assumed that immense tensions would arise if editors were to demand changes to the dramaturgy or content of a series based on, for example, data analyses of audiences.

In addition to screenwriting and its possible datafication, future studies on the hybrid television industry in Germany (and in transnational contexts) should take even greater stock of other production phases and their actors. Fundamental works and concepts of media industry studies and production studies (e.g. Caldwell 2008; Banks et al. 2016b) have made clear that it is precisely below-the-line practitioners who need to be considered—that is, those practitioners beyond the better-known trades associated with creativity. In addition to the invisible work (e.g. Banks 2009, 91) carried out by such below-the-line actors, unpaid work (e.g. Siebert and Wilson 2013) also needs to be looked at more closely in Germany’s drama production industry. Especially in the quality series segment, it is obvious that practitioners put their whole heart and soul into a project and thus possibly exploit themselves. Quality status can function as symbolic capital in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense (e.g. 2010, first 1979), a fact that has repeatedly enabled media industries to demand and gloss over a harmfully high level of commitment and problematic working conditions.

Beyond the quality TV drama discussed in this study, the comprehensive transformation of television production in Germany can mean uncertainty and precarity for practitioners at large. As Mark Deuze and Mirjam Prenger (2019, 16) have noted for media production in general, “a wide array of new roles, skills, and competences” contributes to an ongoing “destabilization process” that practitioners experience and feel. The judgement of quality in and beyond the industry—inherent to discussion of quality series—can also lead to significant stress for practitioners, and the attempt to achieve quality interacts with the requirement under the “creativity dispositif” (Reckwitz 2017, 9) “to constantly perform and present yourself in the best possible light in order to succeed” (Deuze and Prenger 2019, 17). This pressure and precariousness are also rooted in the temporary organisational form of the project network, which continues to characterise series production in Germany, especially in the case of prestigious quality dramas, which usually consist of only a few episodes and, unlike weekly and daily soaps and traditional procedural shows, are not produced over long periods of time. Consequently, the majority of television producers bounce from project to project.

In public and semi-public announcements—for example, in industry publications or at festivals and panels—industry players often downplay precariousness and insecurity. The situation is somewhat different when it comes to the issue of diversity, which producers and industry publications from Germany have more recently taken up, regarding both content and production teams (Niemeier 2021b, c). However, studies by the MaLisa Foundation, an organisation initiated by the German actor Maria Furtwängler and her daughter Elisabeth Furtwängler (e.g. Prommer and Linke 2019), have shown that women remain underrepresented in German television and film fiction, especially from the age of 30 onwards. On the production side, empirical studies have also identified a lack of diversity. This deficit likely characterises prestigious quality series in particular, considering Skadi Loist and Elizabeth Prommer’s (2019, 99) finding that especially male directors dominate when it comes to such high-budget productions. For the leading personnel of German quality TV drama, therefore, a tendency towards an overrepresentation of men also ultimately seems to be formative. Alisa Perren and Thomas Schatz (2015, 91) note a similar finding in their examination of past and current showrunners of US productions: “[W]hite males continue to disproportionately dominate fictional prime-time producing positions; women and people of colour still struggle to find spots on writing staffs, let alone become showrunners”.

Discrimination and hierarchies along the lines of gender, race, class, age and other aspects of identity should be addressed more closely in future studies on television production in Germany and examined in relation especially to questions of value inherent to the industry. This is not just about a general “principle of justice”. Rather, Charlotte Brunsdon’s point (taken up in Chapter 2) that judgements of taste depend on context is fundamentally valid here: “Quality for whom?, Judgement by whom?, On whose behalf?” (1990, 73). In view of the many contemporary quality dramas from Germany with primarily male characters and central production participants (as in the case of Babylon Berlin, ARD/Degeto/Sky Deutschland, 2017), it is doubtful that the television and film industry in Germany is becoming more diverse, and thus that its tastes and other selection criteria are likewise expanding. But it is perhaps the case that diversity—at least in terms of gender and race (less so in terms of class and age, which are often “blind spots” in current diversity discourses)—is increasingly coming to be regarded as an evaluation criterion by the industry. If so, then it is possible that this concern is influencing the industry’s negotiations on television quality and the production conditions required for it. Might we indeed expect more innovative and diverse German drama content in the future?

9.5 Transformation of Contents, Forms and Storytelling

The contents, forms and storytelling of television are changing, especially in the case of the quality TV drama, since it makes space for the testing and negotiation of unusual narrative forms (at least for German television fiction), especially in connection with new forms of distribution. Chapter 7 presented the practitioners’ discussions on contents and forms in more detail. In particular, it worked out how the professionals critically engaged with current television fiction from Germany on the basis of their attributions regarding serial quality TV. For example, they repeatedly mentioned and complained about the German tendency towards single films, especially at the public broadcasters; these films in particular distinguish local TV fiction from that of other countries. Furthermore, the chapter discussed the practitioners’ confrontations with current quality TV projects from Germany. Alongside euphoric diagnoses of a current German “wave” in TV drama, other, more critical voices identified ongoing story deficits and unfulfilled expectations. Failures and deficiencies were also partly attributed to television history, although some practitioners identified German quality television precisely as part of this retrospective, citing the satire Kir Royal – Aus dem Leben eines Klatschreporters / Kir Royal – From the Life of a Gossip Reporter (ARD/WDR, 1986) and the epos Heimat – Eine deutsche Chronik / Heimat: A German Chronicle (ARD/WDR/SFB, 1984) as examples worthy of imitation.

Such referencing of other series was a notable facet of the examined industry discourse. This practice aligns with studies that emphasise the influence that previous film and television works have on current production and development modes. According to Eva Novrup Redvall’s model of the “screen idea system”, which builds on the “screen idea work group” (Macdonald 2010) concept, the “trends, tastes and traditions” (2013, 31) stemming from existing television and film productions influence the screenwriting process, and they likewise affect creative individuals and institutional gatekeepers, who develop certain mandates and management approaches (Waade et al. 2020, 7–8). Against this background, the practitioners’ focus on contents and forms when discussing German quality TV drama—which overlaps with similar public debates in newspaper feature pages and television criticism in general—has a “realpolitik” or practical significance for the German TV industry and its screenwriting practices. Gatekeepers such as commissioning editors decide, on the basis of narrative and aesthetic concepts and judgements, whether certain scripts are developed and realised and to what extent. These decision-makers are influenced by debates of both the industry and the public. Creatives in individual screen idea work groups also repeatedly negotiate which existing works they are significantly (not) oriented towards (Macdonald 2010, 54).

Individual programmes and their evaluation play a decisive role especially today, in the changed media environment. In linear television, the focus was and is primarily on formatting according to broadcasting schedules and on the programme’s flow—that is, the merging of programmes and their reception (Williams 1984, first 1975); however, in the quality or high-end segment, it is much more a matter of standing out from the mass of programmes and leaving formulas behind. In several current TV dramas from Germany, we can observe greater flexibility in the length of individual episodes, a decoupling from specific broadcast slots and their tonalities, and a greater variety of themes and aesthetics. However, the diagnosis that there has been a “complete breakout” from the formatting often lamented by practitioners is contradicted by the fact that linear broadcast slots still (co-)determine visibility, budget, contents and tonalities of series. Furthermore, new formulas are also emerging in the segment of quality TV drama that is strongly distributed online. Thus, ingredients that German practitioners have attributed to US quality TV have also found their way into German TV series, such as quite explicit scenes of sex and violence (e.g. Parfum/Perfume, ZDFneo/Netflix, 2018–); a high density of plots and turning points (e.g. Dark; Legal Affairs, ARD/Degeto/RBB, 2021); and (male) anti-heroes of an ambivalent nature (e.g. Euer Ehren/Your Honour, ARD/Degeto/ORF, 2022).3 As Hélène Monnet-Cantagrel (2021, 127) notes in relation to the high-budget period drama Versailles (Canal+, 2015–2018), there is “a sort of international standard, where only the scenery changes but whose style and audacity boils down to ‘sex or violence every 15 minutes’”. In a similar vein, the screenwriter Annette Hess (2019) opined in our interview that streaming services in particular demand exciting, attention-grabbing content, which in her view often leads to sensationalised storytelling. Future evaluation discourses on contents and forms seem inevitable in view of such assessments and programme developments.

9.6 Outlook

The last systematic study of television in Germany is now more than 20 years old (Hickethier 1998) and refers to a time when streaming providers, their drama programmes and the modes of reception associated with them did not yet exist. Since then, television has undergone considerable transformation and expansion. By focusing on writers and other TV professionals involved in screenwriting, their modes of production and their discourses on programmes, with particular attention paid to the so-called quality TV drama, this book has drawn a comprehensive, though by no means conclusive, picture of current television in Germany and its changes. To evaluate the observed transformations of television and screenwriting, it makes sense to consider them in the context of broader processes of social upheaval. In view of the digital transformations in television as well as other areas, particularly instructive is, as has been shown throughout this book, Andreas Reckwitz’s concept of the “society of singularities”:

[T]he media technological revolution of computing, algorithms, and the World Wide Web, […] since the 1990s, has enabled not only the introduction of new cultural elements to the world (photos and stories, works of graphic art, films, games) in a historically unprecedented manner, but also the creation of a mobile realm of permanent competition for attention, in which singularities are to be made visible for potentially everyone and everything. (2020, 148)

Within the complex observed by Reckwitz, the industry’s negotiations on and turn towards the quality TV drama can be understood as practices of “valorization” and “singularization” (146). Following his diagnosis, I propose to interpret quality series as “singular goods […] that contain the promise of something authentic and non-interchangeable” (148) and that fight for visibility and esteem among the different online services. Reckwitz further assesses that the late-modern culture of digitality gives rise to a “cultural space of images, narrations, game situations—a cultural hypertext, which constantly accompanies every subject and wherein an overproduction of cultural singularities is taking place” (151). If we are to follow this argument, then we must also take into account forms of hybrid, digital television other than the fictional quality drama under consideration here. Scripted reality TV, for instance, is a very obvious example, as it emphasises the imperative of singularity in its content. Alongside Germany’s commercial broadcasters, which sit under the opposing media conglomerates ProSiebenSat.1 Media and the RTL Group, streaming services also offer such “factual entertainment”, which is usually less expensive to produce than fiction. And yet it is, more than any other programme type, the quality TV drama that desires to stand out from the mass of programming and therefore greatly strives for singularity—just as its practitioners, in their network-like cooperations, strive to produce a “singular good”, with a special narrative, aesthetic, creative, ludic and moral-ethical quality, as Reckwitz (2020, 146) attests is common among today’s cultural objects.

In view of particularly public broadcasters’ ongoing tendency to commission and (co-)finance quality series, it is possible to say that sociopolitical relevance (a kind of moral-ethical quality) plays a particularly important role in the German context. In the diversified, digital media environment, public broadcasters face challenges in keeping up with the quality programmes of their commercial competitors, especially SVoD platforms, while simultaneously producing and distributing fiction productions for different segments of the population as part of their sociocultural mandate. Can they contribute to social cohesion through TV dramas—a function that is needed more than ever in the society of singularities, in which many members use different, individual media instead of sharing the same content and engaging in mutual discussion through it? Or do public broadcasters precisely support social separation through producing ambitious quality dramas as “singular goods” (Reckwitz 2020, 148) that attract only very particular groups? Such questions are also ripe for exploring in future discussions on television quality—although, as Reckwitz (2018, 435) generally notes, retrospection on the lost “generality” of industrial and bourgeois modernity (such as television’s loss of power as a mass medium) tends to have a nostalgic character.

We cannot be certain how the future of quality series from Germany and their screenwriting cultures will unfold in public-service broadcasting and beyond, particularly in relation to other types of programmes and other countries’ productions in the expanded and increasingly digital transnational television landscape. More and more, doubts are being raised about the economics of many SVoD providers, especially Netflix, as their mountains of debt continue to pile up and individual prestige productions, such as The Crown (Netflix, 2016–2023), become extremely expensive, while their share values and numbers of subscribers remain static or even decrease (see e.g. Zarges 2022a). Will the relatively young, US-dominated streaming providers therefore continue to produce German TV dramas in the longer term? In Netflix’s transnationally available portfolio—a prime example of the overcrowded cultural space of the digital, in Reckwitz’s (2020, 151) terms—German-language series, just like other non-English programmes distributed mainly with subtitles, are in danger of being quickly lost in the fray, in any case. When it comes to platforms like Netflix, Lothar Mikos (in Christiani 2021) generally points to viewers’ limited interest in non-English-language, “local” series beyond the respective markets of origin. According to industry representatives, the openness to such series has increased in Anglo-Saxon markets (e.g. Harris 2018, 327), but in Germany and elsewhere around the globe this interest is ultimately very limited, usually restricted to Spanish and South Korean productions. High-end series from Germany have not been as transnationally popular as the South Korean survival drama Squid Game (Netflix, 2021–) or the Spanish crime show Money Heist/La casa de papel (Netflix/Antena 3, 2017–2021), both of which are admittedly isolated phenomena and, in their publicly proclaimed success, products of skilful Netflix marketing. Nevertheless, they offer clear evidence that transnational “blockbuster series” (Eichner 2013, 46, my translation) are no longer limited to English-language productions. Despite the comparatively lower transnational clout of German TV drama, the high turnover and large core audience of the German-language television market (Eichner and Esser 2020, 190), as well as the legal instrument of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), speak to the continuing importance of series from Germany at, but also beyond, the SVoD providers. The European Commission’s AVMSD obliges transnational platforms to have a 30% minimum share of “European works” (European Commission 2020) in their video-on-demand portfolio. Streaming companies such as Amazon Prime Video must therefore focus on German-language content for reasons other than self-interest.

It remains to be seen what developments the AVMSD will lead to in individual EU countries and what successes German producers will see from their demands for a local investment obligation from transnational SVoD operators (see Zarges 2021a). As of the publication of this book in 2024, it is also uncertain what sort of influence the inflation, economic turmoil and energy crises in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the aftermaths of the Covid-19 pandemic will have on quality drama efforts from Germany. “[I]t is not yet clear whether this watershed moment will mark the end of the European renaissance or the beginning of a further phase of rethinking and reshaping”, stated Luca Barra and Massimo Scaglioni (2021a, 1) in the midst of the pandemic in 2021. A similarly vague assessment can be made for the more specific context of Germany. During the pandemic, it looked as if the importance of streaming providers and non-linear online distribution, as well as the importance of the series distributed in this context, was continuing to rise (see e.g. Mantel 2021). It was cinema, rather than series, production that was losing ground. However, at least since 2022, a sort of decline can be observed among transnational SVoD services, including those involved in German serial fiction, whereby projects have not been continued or not even realised in the first place. Martin Moszkowicz, then CEO of Constantin Film, commented in an article published on DWDL.de:

The gold rush era in streaming is over, but I see that more as a positive development. Because what matters now is what we are strong at anyway – commercial quality with special programmes that resonate with viewers, and not just volume at any price. (Zarges 2022b, my translation)

Moszkowicz’s statement proves that practitioners once again brought issues of quality into play.

Quality serials, which practitioners and critics have long pined for in German television fiction, continue to be developed and produced on a large scale. In view of the high output of TV dramas in Germany and beyond, as well as the clear indication we have already reached “peak television” (John Landgraf in Rose and Guthrie 2015)—passing its zenith through an oversupply of series—questions of quality once again arise. It is possible that quality will now become an even more decisive criterion for gaining attention among the mass of cultural objects in today’s society of singularities (Reckwitz 2020) and under more difficult market conditions. Quality—this much seems clear—will continue to be a central theme of Germany’s hybrid, digitalised television industry in the future, and one whose transformations will emerge in screenwriting and beyond.

Notes

  1. 1.

    The full list of German series case studies to acquire the interviewees is: Babylon Berlin (ARD/Sky Deutschland, 2017–), Club der roten Bänder/Red Band Society (Vox, 2015–17), Dark (Netflix, 2017–20), Deutschland 83/86/89 (RTL/Amazon Prime Video, 2015–20), Drinnen – Im Internet sind alle gleich / Inside – On the Internet All Are Equal (ZDF, 2020), DRUCK/SKAM Germany (Funk/ZDF, 2018–), ECHT/Real (ZDF, 2021–), Eichwald, MdB (ZDF, 2014–19), Mitten in Deutschland: NSU / NSU German History X (ARD et al., 2016), Die Stadt und die Macht/The City and the Power (ARD/NDR/Degeto, 2016), Das Verschwinden/The Disappearance (ARD et al., 2017), Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo/We Children from Zoo Station (Amazon Prime Video et al., 2021) and 4 Blocks (TNT Serie, 2017–19). See also Krauß 2023c, 23–30.

  2. 2.

    For such approaches in the Netherlands, see Keilbach and Surma 2022.

  3. 3.

    Euer Ehren is the German counterpart to Your Honor (Showtime, 2020–22), both of which are adaptations of the Israeli drama Kvodo (yes studios, 2017).