Deutschland 83

Direct Beam Comms #152

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, TVOctober 28, 2018October 28, 2018

TV

Deutschland 86 ⭐⭐⭐

The first Deutschland 83 series on Sundance ended its run way back in the summer of 2015. That series, about East German spy Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay) infiltrating West Germany in 1983 was pretty good, kind’a like The Americans but from a German perspective. And now comes the next season Deutschland 86 that unfortunately, much like Mr Inbetween on FX, seems to be being burned off by Sundance since the series is airing at the very desirable slot of midnight (Eastern). What’s crazy is Deutschland 86 could easily be airing in primetime except that Sundance are instead airing episodes of Law and Order that at this point are nearly 20 years old.

Anyway…

Now set in 1986 just four years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which symbolically was the end of the Cold War and the beginning of German reunification, the action has shifted from averting a conflict between East and West Germany to instead the survival of East Germany. They’re literally running out of money as the Soviet Union begins pulling back as their economy begins to implode leaving East Germany short on everything from food to medicine. They’re so desperate that East German spy Lenora Rauch (Maria Schrader) is in South Africa trying to broker an arms deal, even though the South African government are their enemy, while back at home government officials Walter Schweppenstette (Sylvester Groth) and Annett Schneider (Sonja Gerhardt) work on a deal with a West German drug manufacturer to run a trial on some shady drugs in the East in order to obtain some hard currency.

Deutschland 86 wasn’t at all what I had expected. The first season was much more the traditional spy drama, with Martin having to hide in plain sight in the West as he desperately tries to avert World War III. But this season is a bit different. Now, these spies are using their trade not to get one up on the west, but to instead try and save their country as it begins spiraling down the drainpipe of history. It’s a very interesting story/twist that I’m really interested in seeing where it all goes.

What To Watch This Week

Sunday

In their final “Mummy Sunday” before Halloween, TCM will be airing The Mummy’s Shroud and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb tonight.

Monday

TCM will be airing loads of horror movies today including The Curse of the Cat People, Children of the Dammed, Village of the Damned, Island of Lost Souls and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Tuesday

Insomniac Theater: Very early this morning TCM will run The Fly and The Frozen Dead.

Later on in the day they’ll also be airing King Kong and Things to Come.

The surprise hit of the summer The Meg is available on digital download today.

Wednesday – Halloween

Insomniac Theater: TCM will broadcast the classic Night of the Living Dead and the not-so-classic Plague of Zombies very early this morning.

The IFC horror series Stan Against Evil will debut its third season tonight.

TCM will be running loads of horror movies all day long including Dementia 13, Cat People, Carnival of Souls, Spirits of the Dead, From Beyond the Grave, Black Sabbath and Dead of Night. Halloween evening they have a marathon of movies featuring Vincent Price planned including House of Wax, Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, House on Haunted Hill, Theater of Blood and The Last Man on Earth.

Thursday

Beginning very early Thursday morning TCM will be running a load of genre movies including Mighty Joe Young, The Valley of Gwangi, 2001: A Space Odyssey, One Million Years B.C., Brainstorm and Clash of the Titans.

HDNET Movies will be airing The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension this morning.

Friday

The final season of the Netflix series House of Cards is available today.

The second season of the animated Mike Judge Presents: Tales From the Tour Bus debuts tonight on Cinemax. Whereas the first season followed the behind the scenes goings on of country musicians, the second will follow funk.

Bohemian Rhapsody about the band Queen premiers in theaters today.

Saturday

Insomniac Theater: Based on a Stephen King story of the same name, though the two are wildly different, TCM will run The Lawnmower Man early this morning.

The Watch List

DC Collectibles – The Joker by Rick Baker

Rumor Control

I’ve been od’ing on horror movies the last few weeks, which is something I tend to do during the month of Halloween. Beginning in September I start DVRing scary movies and save them for October. And during October the TV channels air loads of horror movies too so at any one time I might have 10 of them queued up to watch next.

This October I’ve watched things as diverse as movies like The Old Dark House, Halloween and Evil Dead to name a few to TV series like The House on Haunted Hill and old episodes of Making Monsters too.

When I watch movies I try and watch them as uncut as possible but sometimes I do have to admit that I’ll watch them with commercials or even worse “edited for content.” It’s hard to pass up a showing of Creepshow even when it’s on AMC that tends to insert commercials every few minutes and cut the good parts of the movies to ribbons.

But all that ends this week.

Sure, I’ll still watch horror movies throughout the year, but not as many as I am right now. Part of that is there’s less of them airing on TV after October when everyone goes right into Christmas mode. The good news is that I’m still working my way through The House on Haunted Hill series too which I probably won’t get through until the end of the year.

But for the most part, I’ll be back to watching maybe one or two horror movies a month until next fall.

+++

This is also the time of year I start working on my “best of” columns for the end of the year. I usually do three of them; the best posters, TV shows and what I call “best of the rest” which is a catch-all. But this year I don’t think I’m going to be doing a “best of” posters column. It’s not like there weren’t a lot of good posters out this year, but I don’t think there were a lot of great ones either, with a few exceptions. And I don’t know if those few exceptions are enough to justify an entire column — or that I can come up with enough to write about them?

What sucks is that the “best of” posters column is usually one of the more popular things I write each year. And these columns tend to drive a lot of traffic to my site years after they’ve been published as well. So I’m a bit weary of not doing one because of that.

But on the other hand, is that a good enough reason to write a column I might not be into writing? Instead I might write a ”My Movie Rundown” column about all the movies I saw in 2018. I always felt weird about writing a “best of” movies column since I really don’t see too many movies a year, but maybe a general “rundown” column would make me feel better about writing about them?

Cool Movie Poster of the Week

2018/2019 TV preview

Feature, TVSeptember 7, 2018August 25, 2018

It’s going to be a long fall. Usually, when the weather starts changing and the nights start getting longer I look forward to staying in and checking out the new series on TV. But this fall isn’t looking too good. Sure, there’s a few things to watch, but not enough for my taste and only a handful of series on network TV. The template the networks have taken for the 2018–2019 season is to debut a lot of lame-looking sitcoms and tired cop/hospital/lawyer procedural dramas that all seem to have been done before.

The good news is it isn’t all bad, there are quite a few new series on cable and streaming services to look forward to. The bad news is that most of these series don’t start airing until much later in the year and even then quite a few not until 2019. Oh well, there’s always horror movies marathons come Halloween to fill the gap.

New series

On FOX the vampire thriller The Passage starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar is set to put a lot of stakes into the hearts of the undead ghouls in the one network show I want to check out in January. While the novel the series is based on took place mostly in a future overrun with the blood-suckers, this new TV show looks to moved things back a bit to the pre-apocalypse when these vampires were just being created in the lab.

Manifest on NBC about a plane that takes off one day but lands five years later with everyone on board not realizing the time-jump departs September 24. I think I’d be more looking forward to this show if it didn’t look like a clone of many other series before it, especially Lost.

Matt Weiner’s follow-up series to his uber-successful Mad Man entitled The Romanoffs is set to debut on Amazon Prime October 12. I’m not totally sure how this one’s going to go, but reportedly this anthology series will focus on characters who think they’re related to the Russian royal family the Romanoffs.

After the animated Star Wars: Rebels series on Disney ended earlier this year comes the new series Star Wars Resistance also on Disney October 13. This one is set to take place around the time of the current film series but before the events of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

SYFY is once again trying their hand at traditional sci-fi series with Nightflyers, based on the George R.R. Martin book of the same name. Not at all looking to cash in on Martin’s name and the fact that he wrote Game of Thrones and therefore SYFY can promote Nightflyers as such, here, it’s the near-future and as the ship of the same name explores the solar system it uncovers something that threatens everyone abroad the ship. Nightflyers does sound a bit derivative of things like Event Horizon (1997), except that the novel the series is based on was written way back in 1980.

The Netflix series Another Life has an astronaut (Katie Sackhoff) leading a mission to find the origins of an alien artifact, but this artifact might be deadly and the mission one-way. Maybe the cast of Another Life and Nightflyers can team-up since their two shows sure sound a lot alike.

The iconic comic book mini-series then film Watchmen will become an HBO TV series of the same name sometime next year. There’s not a whole lot that is known about this one, other than apparently it doesn’t totally follow the story of the comics but instead takes place in the same comic universe.

And as for new shows this season, that’s about it. I’m sure I’ll checkout some of those lame-looking sitcoms hoping to be surprised with something interesting, but I’m not holding my breath.

Returning series

Fortunately, there are a few returning shows this year to look forward to.

Returning network shows that will premiere this year include The Good Place, the sitcom about a group of people lead by Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) stuck between heaven and hell returns to NBC on Thursday, September 27 and The Orville on FOX that is Seth MacFarlane’s love-letter to the classic series Star Trek squeaks into 2018 with its second season debut on Sunday, December 30.

Two Netflix superhero series return this year too. First up is the second season of Iron Fist which drops September 7. Then, sometime later in the year, comes a third season of Daredevil who appear last season on The Defenders. I honestly don’t really remember what happened in the second season of Daredevil since it aired more than a year and a half ago at this point. Weren’t there lots of ninjas?

Doctor Who returns for its 11th season of the modern incarnation of the character October on BBC America here in the US. The big news with Doctor Who is that after 55 years and more than a dozen versions of the character, this time the lead will be played by a woman, Jodie Whittaker. Personally, I still like Peter Davison’s version of the character the best, no matter how many Matt Smith fans out there I have to go all “Sharks and Jets” with.

The Sundance series Deutschland 86 will return for its second season October 25. The first season was about an East German spy played by Jonas Nay infiltrating West Germany in order to steal military secrets and had tinges of The Americans to it. The third season looks to pick up three years from there and just a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The British sci-fi series Black Mirror will serve up more creepy goodness sometime this winter on Netflix. Even after four seasons I still really dig this show and I think it’s partially because even though there’s already been those four seasons, Black Mirror is an anthology series so each episode is a story unto itself. And to date there’s been just 20 episodes of it produced in total, which is less than how many episodes of a modern network series are produced in just one year, so the show is still fresh.

A second season of Star Trek: Discovery returns to CBS All Access this January. The first season of Discovery got good enough reviews from Trek fans, if those were the only people seemingly watching it, and the second season looks to bring in the big guns to the show, namely the USS Enterprise along with its Captain Kir… errr… I mean Captain Pike (Anson Mount).

The Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things will return for its third season summer of 2019. Last time we left the plucky kids of Hawkins, Indiana seemingly having beaten the evil forces that had emerged from the “upside down,” but if other sci-fi shows have taught me anything it’s that every victory against evil is just temporary. Until the final episode of the series, that is.

My favorite superhero series The Punisher also returns to Netflix sometime next year. The first season ended with Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) having totally accepted the mantel of the skull wearing vigilante by blasting all the baddies to smithereens with the second season looking to pick up from there.

A surprise to me this spring was just how much I dug the first season of the AMC series The Terror about an ill-fated expedition to the Arctic the 19th century. The second season will reportedly have a new story and focus on Japanese Americans during the second world war since the first season ended with pretty much the entire cast dead. That’s not a spoiler since the first season was based on a real-life expedition that ended in tragedy and I’m not sure you can consider a historical fact a “spoiler.”

A third season of the critical darling then critically derided True Detective will debut on HBO sometime next year four years after the second. The third season looks to “one-up” the first since that told a story over two time periods by telling a story over three.

Shows that I think will premiere sometime in 2019

My favorite series of the 2017–2018 season , Mindhunter is set to begin its second season on Netflix next year. This show about the creation of a serial killer hunting unit within the FBI in the 1970s was one of the most well-written and acted shows on TV in recent memory. Plus the series is co-produced and had a few episodes directed by David Fincher which is always a good thing.

The sci-fi drama The Expanse will leave its home of three seasons on SYFY and move over to the Amazon Prime service next year. The third season ended on a high note, so I’m extremely excited to see where the show will go from here.

Another sci-fi drama, this time Westworld, is set to debut its third season on HBO. Now, I won’t even pretend to say that I understood what all happened in the second season finale of Westworld, I don’t think it was quite on the level of the final episode of Lost or anything, but I suppose time will tell.

Previous Previews

Deutschland 83 opening credits

UncategorizedJuly 30, 2015July 30, 2015

UncategorizedJuly 1, 2015June 30, 2015

I can honestly say until very recently I’d never watched a show that originated from Germany. Sure, I’d viewed loads of series from other countries but I don’t think that I’d ever watched one that was in another language with subtitles before.

That was until I checked out the show Deutschland 83 on Sundance.

My understanding up to now was that German TV wasn’t up to snuff. That whereas English speaking countries like the US, UK and Australia were producing more nuanced and thoughtful TV series, the Germans were stuck on big bombastic shows. But after watching Deutschland 83 I couldn’t believe how wrong I was.

Like The Goldbergs and Halt and Catch Fire that takes place in the 1980s, and another that focuses on spies and the Cold War in that decade with The Americans and The Assets, Deutschland 83 is set in a very different Germany than is there today. Now Germany is an economic powerhouse that is a core member of the European Union. But back then it was a divided nation between east and west with the Berlin Wall still six years away from falling. Halved after WW2, West Germany was aligned with the US and NATO while East Germany was with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Which meant that a divided Germany was ground-zero for the Cold War and would also literally be ground-zero if a real war ever broke out between the superpowers.

Enter Moritz Stamm (Jonas Nay), a 20-something East German soldier who just so happens to look like a West German aide to an important officer in the planning of any conflict with the east. So Moritz becomes Martin and enters into the spy-game expected to steal secrets and stay one step ahead of the people hunting him in order that his mother stay on a kidney transplant list back home.

To say that Moritz is unequipped for the job would’t be an understatement. He’s literally kidnapped in the first episode and transported to the west in order to train to become an agent. But he does what must be done and puts his life on the line for his side which, even after having spent time in the west, he still believes in.

As Moritz spends more time undercover his position becomes more and more exposed. Will Martin’s friends from the past show up and find Moritz out? Will Moritz slip up and be caught copying documents? Will a spy from another country eliminate him to steal his secrets?

With the hindsight of history it’s interesting to see how the creators of Deutschland 83 (American Anna Winger and her German husband Jörg) are setting their fictional story with real-life events. In the second episode there’s mention of the “Able Archer” military exercises that really took place in ’83. While these were held for NATO prepare for the possibility of war, the Soviets thought they might instead be a secret lead-up to a real war and started planning for conflict.

In fact the US and the USSR were so close to war during the exercises that the USSR was ready at a moment’s notice to attack west. And it was only because of the realization of this from the US and the pullback of some of the exercises and the fact that there were no false alarms on the USSR side, which seemed to happen quite frequently during the 1980s, that the world wasn’t incinerated to a nuclear ash because of Able Archer.

Every fictional modern take on the Cold War gives the perspective from the west — even with The Americans that has Soviet agents operating in the US still takes place in the US with US sensibilities. But Deutschland 83 comes from a totally different perspective. Here in the US we were at least somewhat removed from the realities of the east/west conflict back then. Sure, if a war ever happened New York would be just as devastated as Berlin but enemy tanks weren’t literally on our border ready to cross at a moments notice.

Germany in 1983 didn’t have the luxury of distance that we had. If a war ever did happen, even a “limited” one, it would mean a devastated and probably radioactive Germany for years to come. That’s why the events of Deutschland 83 are so interesting. Not only are spies like Moritz trying to find out the secrets of the other side; they’re doing this agains their own countrymen. People that had fought alongside each other just a few decades prior in WW2 were now sworn enemies in the Cold War.

It was a weird time in Germany’s history which I think is why Deutschland 83 is one of the most interesting series on TV.

Deutschland 83 is an eight episode series that airs Wednesday nights at 11 (EST) on Sundance. If it continues on its current schedule the series should wrap up sometime in early August.

Tag: Deutschland 83