TV review
Magnificence in Pattensen
Hyped kitsch series “Maxton Hall” at Marienburg Castle: Like “Gossip Girl” for the poor
Clichés united: The smarmy womanizer James and the good gray mouse Ruby in the private school “Maxton Hall”
© Amazon Prime
The Amazon Prime series “Maxton Hall – The World Between Us” inspires thousands of viewers on social media. It looks like a copy of “Gossip Girl” created with artificial intelligence. The success can be explained primarily by one person.
A pretty boy with a Hugh Grant memorial hairstyle and a young woman in a school uniform give each other deep looks. The two kiss. Tears shimmer in his eyes, he breathes heavily. This is all accompanied by dramatic music. Compilations like this one from the Amazon Prime series “Maxton Hall – The World Between Us” have been collecting on Tiktok for weeks. The actors also look down from billboards in German cities. After a teen series with an elitist look from “Gossip Girl”, “Maxton Hall” looks very promising at first glance. For fans of young adult series.
In addition, half of the episodes with German actors were filmed in Lower Saxony. That’s a good thing: entertaining content for young people doesn’t always have to be created with a huge budget in New York. Maybe Pattensen is enough. And a shooting time of 60 days. Or not?
A series like ChatGPT
It seems too much to try to make a comparison to the successful series “Gossip Girl”. But here the authors really aim for it. The main characters are called Ruby and James and attend a private elite high school at Marienburg Castle, which is said to be in England. The British production seems cringeworthy, but is somewhat understandable. James and Ruby from the college simply sound more charming than Mareike and Joseph from the Pattensen comprehensive school.
James, who looks as if he was created in the image of the prince-role man, and Ruby, a rather inconspicuous young woman, couldn’t be more opposite. She comes from, as they say, a humble background, James from a family of millionaires. She is the good, kind-hearted nerd, he is the smarmy womanizer who carries around wads of cash. Although the two try with all their might to hate each other, they fall in love. That would be the majority of the plot summarized in one sentence. The script is as predictable as if it were created from the first version of ChatGPT. Assignment: “Write a young adult series about a millionaire heir and a gray mouse who fall in love at an elite boarding school, a mixture of ““Twilight”, “Gossip Girl” and “Pride and Prejudice” – but cost-effectively please. Maybe instead of New York…Pattensen?”
In fact, it is a film adaptation of the novel “Save Me” by the German “New Adult” author Mona Kasten. The subgenre of romance novels is intended to appeal primarily to young adults between 18 and 25 who are still emerging from their teenage years. Classically, it’s about the first big feelings, like those that arise with Ruby and James.
“Maxton Hall” consists of superficial characters and flat dialogue
There is nothing objectionable about kitsch. Unfortunately, the makers apparently thought that for an appealing youth series in the style of “Gossip Girl” it was enough to dress teenagers in pink school uniforms and knee-high socks, send them to a castle and train them to have longing looks. What they forget: The production should never be more important than the content. And in “Maxton Hall”, at least in the first season so far, it babbles along without much suspense.
The main characters remain one-dimensional and cliched. James’ father is a bad guy – sure, he’s a millionaire, so he must be cold and mean – while Ruby’s poorer parents are kind-hearted people. In her family there is only patting and laughing. The breaks that make characters identifying figures for the audience, the family intrigues and the humor are missing.
“Maxton Hall” also doesn’t come close to the sharp dialogue in series like “Gossip Girl”. Instead, the script is full of empty phrases that the characters use to describe themselves, since the actions alone don’t succeed. So they say sentences like “I am nothing more than my name” or “I like to be invisible”.
After all: Actor Damian Hardung is so in love with his colleague Harriet Herbig-Matten that he is celebrated on Tiktok by viewers from all over the world for his acting skills. Young women comment that they want to be viewed this way at some point in their lives. Others say they only watch the series because of him.
Understandable – apart from Hardung, “Maxton Hall” doesn’t have much to offer. He is by far the best-known face in the series, having already made a name for himself through his roles as a dealer in “How to sell drugs online” and a boy with cancer in “Club der Rote Ribbons”. So it’s no wonder that “Maxton Hall” begins with one of his strongest scenes: he lies shirtless in bed and presents his six-pack abs.