TV tip
“Days That Were Not” – Outstanding New Series
Prosecutor Miriam Hintz (Franziska Weisz) is in trouble. photo
© Petro Domenigg/ARD/ORF/MR Film/dpa
Was it suicide? Or murder? Do best friends have secrets from each other? And why did a little boy have to die? The first shows a new series that is as exciting as it is unusual.
Four girlfriends, an elite school and a dark secret – at least. The first shows from Valentine’s Day (February 14, 8:15 p.m.) with “Days that didn’t exist” an unusual and very excellent series. “Four women and more than one death,” says the program announcement.
The eight-part series focuses on Miriam (Franziska Weisz), Doris (Diana Amft), Inès (Jasmin Gerat) and Christiane (Franziska Hackl), best friends since their days at the elite school “Sophianum”. They support each other – and with lots of champagne and wine – in all situations and tell each other their problems, if not all of them.
Levels of time artfully overlap
Something unexpected and not necessarily welcome breaks into her life: a Viennese inspector (terrific: Sissy Höfferer), who, together with her young colleague (Tobias Resch), was tasked with finding out whether a suicide a few years ago was really one of them acted.
All this is told in this Austrian series in such an exciting and complex way that is rarely seen on German television. Individual time levels overlap very artfully and the (main) characters are anything but one-dimensional. The icing on the cake is that the sympathizers Harald Krassnitzer (as the sadistic headmaster) and Jutta Speidel (reminiscent of the terrorizing former company boss of Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada”) work incredibly well against their image.
The fact that the four main characters are middle-aged women is actually a minor sensation. “There is now significantly more interest in these characters and perspectives,” says actress Hackl in an interview with the German Press Agency in Munich. “It’s about time. It’s simply unrealistic when every 50-year-old television inspector is given a 25-year-old female inspector.”
Women in front of and behind the camera
For a long time, it has become increasingly difficult for actresses to find roles over the years. Women were cast as main characters in film and television, especially as part of a young loving couple. Since series have been booming, this is slowly changing. “It’s possible that #Metoo has changed something,” said Hackl, who plays a woman in the series with Christiane who is trying to find new courage after the death of her child. “But it also doesn’t matter a bit why it’s like this. It’s important that it’s like this.”
Not only the four main actresses of the series are women – the two directors as well. “I’ve often worked in an environment like this in the theater, but such a female-dominated film or television set was new to me,” said Hackl. “It was really nice work, very intimate.”
Overall, she is slowly but surely observing a greater willingness to experiment in German series: “It’s nice that people in this country now dare more. In our series, the tragic and the comic are often close together, just like in life. It was on television but usually either one or the other.” And with that, emotionality is lost: “Sometimes I would like what’s shown on TV to be juicier. Often you talk about feelings, but you don’t show any.” This series is refreshingly different.