Perfection is no longer in fashion. Today, impeccability is considered superficial, beauty is suspect across the board, and a lack of conflict is boring. Everywhere one is encouraged to show what is genuine, i.e. what is defective. On Instagram, at work, when dating, in relationships, on the beach. You should “embrace” your mistakes, give up increased self-demands, all bodies are beautiful, be lenient if your pants pinch. Selling oneself as obviously flawed and therefore lovable is much more important than impeccability today. So always proactively out with wrinkles, debts, traumas! Because if you have clean pores, throw the first stone!
Meters of non-fiction books and entire lines of business thrive on this new dogma of radical self-love. And with damaged goods a series is now also based on this very contemporary mindset. Eight episodes can now be seen on Amazon Prime, directed by Anna-Katharina Maier, head author is HFF graduate Jonas Bock. In damaged goods, i.e. “damaged goods”, as it is called in the transport and forwarding business, is about five friends who met in the self-help group at school and formed a kind of pain community. So you know straight away: everyone here has something of a hack. And no attempt is made to hide it. It’s much more about that: We’re okay the way we are, come cuddle.
So the injured briefly introduced: Henriette, called “Hennie”, is the uptight tax officer with beach waves and an unhealthy long-term relationship, Mads is the “Kietz mattress” with bonding problems, Hugo is the sensitive gay steward, bullied as a teenager, Tia is the extrovert artist with vaginismus. And Nola, the narrator of the story, has an inferiority complex because she failed her psychology degree. Nola, played by Sophie Passmann, spontaneously starts a podcast in which she, as “the kitchen psychologist”, explains her and her friends’ problems, quoting Hermann Hesse and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Only small defect: The friends know nothing about it.
The five millennials stumble through their sheltered Munich bubble, always carrying their little mistakes and damages in front of them. It’s about the usual: no call-back dates, boring sex or no sex at all, bad sex, children – yes or no and with whom?, unwanted fatherhood, chlamydia, high school reunions in the country, where the bully shows up, the one for the gays bullied and, surprise, is gay himself. All nonchalantly commented by Nola’s friendly podcast voice. It’s all seen many times and literally with Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City heard that too.
People are constantly drinking wine at shared flat tables and assuring themselves that they are okay
Short: damaged goods is a friendship series of the kind that abounds but needs to be recreated for each generation. A mix of friend, Girls and even Sex and the City. “A series about the time when your friends are your family”, like friend-Producer Marta Kauffmann once said. Wine is constantly being drunk at shared flat tables, each other hugging and kissing all the time, the five call each other “darling” and someone always brings “emergency lasagne” over when one of them is feeling unwell. “Love?” Nola asks her friend Hennie before going to bed. “Love!” replies the.
Well like damaged goods like the woke 2022 version of the shows mentioned – more diverse, hipper, faster, less heteronormative. One knows endometriosis, sexism and thinks about open relationships. “Did you just assume my gender?” asks Tia at one point. Of course not, is the answer. But the problem: The touchingly manageable shortcomings of these characters introduced as “damaged” are sold so aggressively as lovable that it’s just annoying for long stretches. Everything is thematised, reflected upon and demonstrated, the figure of Mads being ridiculed, for example, just to illustrate his bonding problems. Or what else do you call it when someone drags a sack of cement around town for a day to get used to the thought of maybe having to push a baby around soon?
In addition, the makers seem to find their series insanely funny themselves. You’re constantly under the impression that someone is telling a good joke and then giggles so loudly that it ruins the punchline. Just so that the series takes itself hyper-seriously again in the next moment: “Death is so consistent that it makes it violent,” it says at one point. Or: “You talk about your problems, Nola, that touches me,” says Nola’s new friend Lenora (Jasmin Gerat). Lenora is significantly older than the clique and, alongside Tia’s smoking grandmother (Michaela May), actually the only sane character. Extensive self-examination, the offensive mistakes of the five, that is part of the cliché of that generation, see above. But it is particularly typical of authors who are far too in love with their material and do not trust their audience with much complexity and prefer to tell it with a mallet, because: A lot helps a lot.
The scenes line up like a never-ending, irrelevant Insta story, glaring and fast, an eternal alternation of deep talk and slapstick, dramaturgically often incomprehensible. After all: where a lot of jokes are cracked, there is always one. For example, when Mads, aka “Single like a Pringle”, demonstrates Nola on an orange how to lick vulva, it’s very funny. Or how Nola eats chips from the hood pocket of a sweater worn the wrong way round. In general: why the whole thing remains bearable to look at in the end is mainly due to the cast: author Sophie Passmann plays herself with the main character Nola, which doesn’t matter, because she’s very good at it. Next to her is an insanely funny Tim Oliver Schultz as the simple character Mads, and Zeynep Bozbay as the artist Tia, eaten up by self-doubt, is always a safe bet, in theater and on television.
In the course of the episodes, all five then head towards something like serious relationships, with children, women, men, curators, away from the flaws – and yet only occasionally dare to emerge from the cover of the clique. The place where they can continue to cultivate their quirks undisturbed. There’s plenty of room for a second season.
Damaged Goods, on Amazon Prime.
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