My favorite programs, however, are:
Rote Rosen: a soap opera about a sexy divorcee who starts her life over again after her bourgeois world comes crumbling down when her husband impregnates their daughter's viperous best friend - only to construct and even more saccharine bourgeois universe for herself. It takes place in Lueneburg, a hamlet a scant hour from Hamburg, and I enjoy the occasional pans over twee red brick buildings.
Menschen Hautnah: a fantastic series of documentaries that take a close look at people in particularly vulnerable situations. I've seen one devoted to a hospice that treats children with terminal cancers and palsy, interviewing the families, caretakers, and children. Another focused on middle-aged men who continue to live with their mothers. A third was a portrait of a day in the life of a dominatrix in Cologne. It's difficult to describe, but the program is never exploitative or out to stage a freak show. What I find most original are the subtle and modest ways it confounds our impulse to set up taboos only to congratulate ourselves on transgressing them.
Tatort: a detective series that has been on the air for decades, a real German cult favorite that alternates among the challenges facing the various Kommissare in different cities all over the country. Who am I to resist? (Here is the actor Klaus J. Behrendt who plays Cologne's Hauptkommissar Max Ballauf. I find him particularly dreamy.)
Grey's Anatomy dubbed in German, called Die Junge Ä
I am also devoted to the channel 3Sat, which is a broadcasting consortium for German, Austrian, and Swiss programming. Sometimes I catch the evening news for Switzerland, and whenever anyone in a report speaks in Swiss German, there are always subtitles in Hochdeutsch, which I particularly appreciate.
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