“Maybe we should do something like Lose-Tagram,” thinks Helene while jogging around in worn-out sports shoes and cycling shorts. “Where people are rewarded for not being invited to panel discussions by an Indian director, for having awkward haircuts, for ordering their shirts on the Internet and such. You then get don’t likes for all these uncool things.” She has just come from a sobering first contact with her best friend’s boyfriend, both of whom, keyword “mindfulness”, are quite successful on social media.
Do we still need a coming-of-age series that shows that life in real life isn’t as glossy as it is on Instagram? After eight episodes oh hell I have to say: absolutely. Because even if the basic idea has been around since Fleabag and Girls is not terribly new (young woman is somehow different from the others), this series is very well done and quite funny.
“I’ll go back to school when my parents sleep together again”
This probably also has something to do with the fact that the screenplay was written by Johannes Boss, who, among other things, Foreign shame classic jerks takes notes. As in jerks is also available in oh hell quite a few scenes where you can neither look nor look away. For example, when a flashback shows the teenage Helene together with her parents at the therapist. The problem: Helene, nicknamed Hell, constantly writes creative excuses for herself not to have to attend class. “I’ll go back to school when my parents sleep together again, I told you that in writing,” says young Helene, who desperately wants a sibling. “I demand that the two of you have intercourse. Really juicy intercourse. With the penis in the vagina.”
Helene (Mala Emde), the series perhaps tries to make that clear, deviates from the mainstream. Wearing red fur clogs and a doner kebab T-shirt, she shocks those closest to her with either radical honesty or equally radical lies. Her father has thought for years that she is studying law, but in reality she sells plants for “Gartentraum24” in a call center.
It gets particularly nice when Helene meets Maike (Salka Weber), her best friend and enemy in a personal union. Maike is an influencer and does something with social start-ups (“Whenever you order something to eat via the app, a bowl for example, you make sure that someone in underprivileged countries can also treat themselves to something, fresh water for example” ), lives in a fancy new building and has the aforementioned boyfriend whose name is Jason. The whole imbalance between Maike and Helene becomes clear when they go to the pool together. Helene in a baggy bathing suit, Maike with swimming goggles and a cap. “I’m swimming dead man, and you breast next to me,” says Maike at some point to Helene, who can hardly keep up with her crooked kick.
So that the whole thing doesn’t end too quickly, a love interest will soon come into play. After Helene told Maike that she had a new friend, a musician (“he brings out a whole new side of me”), she had to deliver. She calls the number of a cello teacher (Edin Hasanovic), takes an hour’s lesson and persuades him to pretend to be her boyfriend over dinner with Maike and Jason. That it doesn’t stop there is obvious.
oh hell impresses less with a dramaturgically particularly sophisticated plot, but above all with a large number of very funny scenes. Mala Emde, since the Antifa drama “And tomorrow the whole world” has been a big up-and-coming star in German cinema, plays her role wonderfully, with lots of energy and a precise sense of punch lines. The half-hour episodes are easy to watch back-to-back – and you can tell they were probably just as fun to produce as they were to watch.
oh hellstarting March 17 on Magenta TV.
You can find more series recommendations here.