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An OnlyFans series on ZDF: “WatchMe – Sex sells”
Josh (Simon Mantei, r.) really wants to be successful on WatchMe. Tim (Michelangelo Fortuzzi, left) is ready to make his contribution. photo
© Jonas Römmig/ZDF/dpa
Does a pay porn web service like OnlyFans fit into the program of public television? The series “WatchMe – Sex sells” dares to tackle this phenomenon for ZDF.
Tim should be studying for high school, but his older friend Josh keeps getting him in front of the camera for porn shoots and his internet career. Does a relationship work well in the long term when a couple’s private and work lives are so close together? When having sex and making money are linked? Problems like this are now being shown in a small contemporary six-part ZDFneo series entitled “WatchMe – Sex sells” (from May 12th in the media library; on linear TV at ZDFneo on the night of June 3rd to 4th).
The series is about platforms like OnlyFans, where self-produced nude photos and sex videos are uploaded and shared, which also involve direct contact with paying customers. In the series, the sex worker platform – a kind of Instagram for erotic content – is called WatchMe instead of OnlyFans.
FSK 16
“In order to implement this topic consistently, we decided on an FSK 16 right from the start and worked closely with intimacy coordination and youth protection,” the makers say. The thoroughly didactic fiction series was written by Jonas Bock, Lene Pottgiesser and Chris Hödl. The director was Alison Kuhn (28).
“I can’t say exactly what the relationship to porn was like when my parents’ generation was young. But I believe that the internet and social media have made access much easier and, if there was no proper or no education in adolescence, that too can lead to great confusion when it comes to body image,” said Tim actor Michelangelo Fortuzzi (22) when asked by the German Press Agency. “It feels like 99 percent of what you find on the internet doesn’t correspond to reality.”
Fortuzzi, who studied acting in London at the Giles Foreman Center for Acting and returned to Berlin after graduating, is one of the young actors in Germany who obviously like to portray taboo things. In the new edition of “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo” as a series on Amazon Prime Video, he embodied drug-addicted Benno, who goes to work. In the ZDF series “Druck” – an adaptation of the Norwegian youth series “Skam” – he played the gay Matteo.
More perspectives
In “WatchMe – Sex sells” Fortuzzi’s character is penetrated in the first few minutes and it’s about partner Josh’s (Simon Mantei) potency problems. “I definitely had to jump over my shadow, but you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into when you agree to a project,” Fortuzzi, 22, says of sex and nude scenes like this one. “You prepare yourself so well that you can mentally prepare for it.”
In addition to the male couple Tim and Josh, two other perspectives on the quite new platform porn business are shown. Malaika (Maddy Frost) also wants to use her account to take action against so-called slutshaming (urging against self-confident and sex-conscious women) and to stand up for a broader picture of beauty. And the single mother Toni (Anna Werner Friedmann) sees money worries in the platform as a promise to rediscover pleasure in her body.