“Me and the others” on Sky: You are known – media

The fairy godmother is a taxi driver. Suddenly he stands in front of Tristan’s house, apparently unordered in his black Mercedes limousine. Tristan (Tom Schilling) is surprised, but gets in, and what starts here is not a kidnapping, but a crazy trip, somewhere between a journey to self-knowledge, matrix-Simulation and fairy tale transplanted into the present.

In the new series by the Austrian author and director David Schalko (Braunschlag, M – a city is looking for a murderer) the taxi driver Tristan fulfills every wish he expresses in the back seat. One of them, the first, must have been heard before he got in: “I want you all to know me!” It has come true: everyone knows everything about him. Since waking up in his fancy loft, he’s been bombarded with angry text messages from his pregnant wife. Outside, too, people look angry, amused, disappointed when he walks past them. The meeting with clients in the agency he works for immediately fails: “You don’t believe your bullshit yourself!” Tristan might have guessed that that’s not really cool.

The action jumps back again and again like a reset button

The friendly and strict taxi driver then revises that for him, but Tristan sticks to the fundamentality of his wishes: “I want you all to love me!” is next, but he doesn’t really like the musical cupcake world into which he is then transferred. Tristan struggles with life, with the many possibilities and the situation he maneuvered himself into before the magic taxi stopped with him: He married his wife Julia (Katharina Schüttler) mainly because she was on the first date of became pregnant. His taxi wishes are therefore primarily aimed at finding out what he actually really wants – a conventional family life with Julia or the reunification with the mysterious, slightly unsettled childhood sweetheart Franziska (Mavie Hörbiger), who soon pushes into his dream world. Classic men’s dilemma.

Because this is not a series of yard goods, but an ambitiously absurd Schalko work, it is of course not simply told after a nice catharsis moment. Sky advertises Me and the others as revolutionary. As a new genre of series, as an example of non-linear, even “discursive” storytelling. The plot jumps back again and again as if with a reset button, secondary characters suddenly move into the center, and after the next wish everything is different again anyway. It is clear to the creators that not every viewer will like this. The series is a prestige project, the prominent cast underscores that. But it’s not because of the new narrative that it doesn’t quite work out despite its many advantages.

Schalko is rightly famous for what he can do like no other: precisely fooling around milieus and exaggerating them with absurd, surreal elements. In the legendary Braunschlag it was the Austrian province. Here it is the narcissistic metropolitan world of digital product developers. The agency Tristan works for is called “42!” After the answer to everything in Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. As a hypernarcissistic boss, Lars Eidinger drives through the glazed corridors on the hoverboard, in his office there is sand on the floor instead of carpet. David Schalko targets an egomaniacal present in which everyone is constantly revolving around himself and his most successful construction of identity.

In Me and the others but you can see it differently than in Braunschlag, because of all the funny ideas, from episode four at the latest, the plot no longer, whether told linearly or not. The series has no hold, is constantly being delimited. From a girl who no longer speaks and sees a savior in Tristan, from insights into the oh-so-crazy Viennese art scene, in which two lesbians with long knives strapped like penises murder in the disco, from LSD trips and sudden images like from the director’s theater that no one ever returns to.

The fact that Sophie Rois and Martin Wuttke Tristans play funny parents to scream is almost a waste: an old sixty-eight artist couple who constantly talk about the main motif on their father’s garish paintings: his penis, with whose size and general well-being Tristan apparently cannot keep up can. Oedipus, Freud – Male Dilemma. It may be that in the already planned second season, all of the insane side lines find their way to resolution. But for the first six episodes, family therapy with these two would have been the clearer form for this series. Definitely the more entertaining one.

Me and the others, six episodes, on Sky from July 29th.