The summer was very long, the evenings are getting shorter, TV couches and streaming series are even more in demand. Netflix, Amazon Prime
This is where fiction meets reality. After all, not a day goes by without a note, without stories about the 50th anniversary of the assassination attempt on Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village. From here, the six-part Sky original series “Munich Games” starts to ask similar questions about the present and a renewed terrorist threat for Israeli athletes in the Bavarian state capital as they did after the attack. How, by what means, can something like this be prevented? Is the German secret service ready for such a mission? Shouldn’t that be left to the Mossad? Has the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians changed since 1972?
The pivot of the story is a football friendly match between an Israeli and a German team in Munich 2022 and two protagonists of the two secret services, who after the terror warning, one suspects, come very close with their different investigative methods: Oren Simon (Seyneb Saleh), a Mossad agent stationed in Berlin, and Maria Köhler (Yousef Sweid), a German LKA officer with Lebanese roots.
Monarchy first. In “The Serpent Queen” we get to know the famous Catherine de Medici (Samantha Morton, “The Walking Dead”) from a whole new side. Part brutal, part humorous, this dark historical drama chronicles the rise of the legendary queen who, as a 14-year-old orphan in a foreign country, enters into an arranged marriage at the 16th-century French court. Although she is a commoner, her uncle Pope Clemens has negotiated a large dowry and a political alliance from which many heirs are expected in exchange for the marriage. Starzplay, from 11.9.
Prime Video’s September highlight is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. As reported, the series prequel premieres on September 2nd, and there are new episodes on Fridays until October 14th. The three petrol junkies Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May also have a large worldwide fan community. Since 2016 their PS show “The Grand Tour” has been running on Amazon Prime.
Monarchy for the second time. More Elisabeth, less Sissi. More space for Emperor Franz Joseph and his mother Sophie, less personality cult around the Empress of Austria and later Queen of Hungary, that’s how showrunner Katharina Eyssen (“Time of Secrets”) created the Netflix series “The Empress”. As a modern series about a historical female figure, beyond the clichés of the Ernst Marischka trilogy from the 1950s.
Something completely different: Punk in series, the mini-series “Pistols” on Disney about the most important and biggest punk band, which triggered a rock-n-roll revolution in 1976 with their first single “Anarchy in the U.K.”. The format is based on guitarist Steve Jones’ memoir (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol).
