In the beginning, you’re a bit afraid to go to these Ochsenknechts, even if it’s just as a viewer of a reality soap on Sky. It’s like the unavoidable visit to the embarrassing relatives after many excuses that eventually became pretty stale. Driving there, you had already shed a lot of ballast by throwing names at each other to snort: Cheyenne, Natascha, Jimi Blue, Wilson Gonzales. Shortly before arrival, the call to order on your own behalf: get yourself together, names are smoke and mirrors, your own doesn’t sound any better, and the Ochsenknechts are famous after all. Where is it going? After Dobl in Austria, Cheyenne and Nino live there.
Like Jimi and Wilson, Cheyenne is the daughter of Natascha and Uwe Ochsenknecht. She is in her early twenties and has “a fucking child” with Nino – she says it herself on the show. This child, by the way, says Nino, who comes from Dobl, “happened despite the spiral. For me it’s a sign from God”. All right: God sends signs directly into the spiral, and in Dobl the Ochsenknechts meet at the beautiful property of Nino’s father, the cattle breeder. The really nice thing about it is that all the Ochsenknechts are there, all but one. Uwe Ochsenknecht has “his own life and his other projects,” Natascha Ochsenknecht told the star. In any case, it doesn’t look like he’s missing much in the show with those mega-chubby Ochsenknechts who have the same name.
Wilson Gonzales says he also likes art and culture and potatoes with cottage cheese
These Ochsenknechts is a slick reality series, just as cleverly done as The Geissen family, who one suspects anyway, they would only stage their botox bulky plumpness in front of the camera and whisper verses by Paul Valéry in the normal everyday life on the Côte d’Azur. It’s similar with the Ochsenknecht family, whose individual members present themselves in the first episode, one after the other, like the characters in a play by Yasmina Reza. Natascha explains to the viewers that most people thought she was beautiful but stupid and only realized after a while that she was capable of something. Wilson Gonzales says he also likes art and culture and potatoes with cottage cheese. Jimi Blue is the solid guy. And when he is insulted by nasty anti-fans on social media, it really bothers him, and he quotes excerpts from it. Funnily enough, the sound of the insult mail hardly differs from the vocabulary of the Ochsenknechts. But that’s not what this documentation of so-called real life is about, whose protagonists sometimes don’t even believe that what they are and what they do is real.
Natascha’s very fit eighty-year-old mother says of herself: “I’m Natascha’s mother, so to speak.” As if a coach had recommended that you try a bit of postmodern identity gimmickry, because that always works. The mother gets on Natascha’s nerves, Natascha annoys the children, but Jimi Blue says that everyone in the family has very good connections with each other, although: “None of us are completely normal”.
Cheyenne Ochsenknecht: “I want to come across as I really am: just shit.”
(Photo: Jennifer Endom/Sky)
That’s the refrain: Everyone is completely crazy, sticks together like mercury and, despite all the fame, has their feet firmly on the ground. They are actually only moderately rich and a bit vulgar. Incidentally, Cheyenne, the youngest, understood this best. Her credo comes from the off (you can see the pretty little farm): “Only lip gloss, then I’m done.”
That’s the way it is. The Ochsenknecht are gifted performers of themselves; they know how to draw themselves with a few rough strokes and have perfectly prepared the story of their display on the drawing board. Cheyenne has had shoots for Portuguese Vogue, as well as French Vogue. Prada, Chanel, “luxury chicks”: “I want to come across as I really am: just shit,” she says.
As smart as Cheyenne none of the Ochsenknechts commuted their own role. Except maybe Natascha, who lands in Graz with globetrotter luggage from – of course – Mallorca and meets Cheyenne, Nino and the little fluffy poodle at the airport, who she will later say looks like a leaked egg. Cheyenne looks like Cheyenne. She’s wearing some kind of frog skin made of fabric, and once they’re inside the apartment, the baby comes into play. It has got two teeth and grandmother Natascha says the fabulous sentence: “You have two toes!”
Between all the banalities cleverly played off as banalities, fate puts together a very good cliffhanger: One day, Mr. Hinteregger and Ms. Gruber from the tax investigation department stand in front of the gate and ask for Jimi Blue. The young Ochsenknecht forgot to respond to requests from the tax office, and now the Austrian police have him under wraps. The terror – staged or spontaneous, who knows? – is passed on from Ochsenknecht to Ochsenknecht, and in the end the viewer knows: He will have to stay tuned and watch the next episodes. Provided he loves art and culture and potatoes with quark – in other words: he loves the Ochsenknechts.
These Ochsenknechts, on Sky.
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