Streaming
The bestseller “Blackout” goes into series production on Joyn
Pierre Manzano (Moritz Bleibtreu), Frauke Michelsen (Marie Leuenberger) and Jürgen Hartlandt (Heiner Lauterbach) in a scene from “Blackout”. Photo: — / Joyn / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Trains stop, elevators get stuck, traffic lights fail: power outages occur again and again in Germany. The “Blackout” series is about to turn off the lights all over Europe – for weeks.
And suddenly everything is dark: cars crash into each other, a train stops in the open and – the nightmare of many fair fans – people are stuck upside down in a roller coaster.
The six-part series “Blackout”, which has been running since Thursday (October 14) on the Joyn streaming service, begins with a horror scenario. But this is only the beginning.
“People can no longer post selfies and no longer shit.” The Minister of the Interior (played by Herbert Knaup) initially assesses the sudden power failure in Germany as succinctly. He complains that he was taken from the opera. In the coming hours, the electricity providers would get the situation under control again. But far from it.
The head of the crisis team (Marie Leuenberger), whose little daughters are stuck in the said train in the middle of Brandenburg, quickly realizes that the power failure – which actually affects all of Europe and can be traced back to an overload of the power grid – can have dire consequences. Patients in hospitals can soon no longer be cared for, water is running out, and the first looting is reported.
But the Chancellor refuses to declare a state of emergency and to get urgently needed emergency power generators from their reserves. “We drive on sight,” says the government. An approach for which the actual federal government was much criticized in the Corona crisis.
The makers of the mini-series, which is based on the bestseller of the same name by Marc Elsberg from 2012, make it clear: Reality has flowed into the scripts. While writing, you noticed how quickly an emergency can escalate. Keywords: hamster purchases and toilet paper.
“Everything that we have seen in the world so far suggests that certain people would get on their throats relatively quickly,” said leading actor Moritz Bleibtreu of the German press agency. “I would like people in situations like this to help each other to solve the problem together. But maybe that’s a bit idealistic. “
The 50-year-old plays the hacker and former environmental activist Pierre Manzano, who believes in a hacker attack and becomes a suspect himself because of his past. Heiner Lauterbach, Jessica Schwarz and Francis Fulton-Smith can also be seen in other roles.
Bleibtreu refers to how close the utopia of the novel comes to today’s reality. Large-scale power outages keep making headlines, most recently in Munich and Dresden. “We just use more and more electricity. At the same time, our infrastructure and “hardware” have been relatively untouched for many years. That has to change. “