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Reviews
Liebes Kind (2023)
Uneven, but good
At the beginning it seemed like a cheap Dark knock-off with one mistery trying to outdo the next, but it quickly settled. My biggest gripe with this series is how slow it often was. Scenes moving at a snail's pace and the camera lingering on people looking off in the distance or just crying.
My second gripe is with the OST. 90% of the time I don't even notice an OST, the other 10% is so good that I have to praise it. Not this one. This one felt cheesy and overstayed its welcome. I bet some of the tracks title were "mysterious_sounds.mp3"
But onto the good! I don't want to say much about the core mystery, but by and large I am very happy with their execution, even if it annoyed me early on. It kept me guessing at every corner, and to me, that is a good sign in a mystery series. I was afraid that they were gonna overdo it and have some extremely mess by the end, but they knew just when to stop.
Every actor and actress (even the kids!) did a great job, except Haley Louise Jones (Aida) who couldn't outact a stone, but thankfully she got less screentime as the series progressed.
I liked some of the side-characters, like the goofy policewoman or the nice nurse, that I actually wish we've gotten more of them!
Lauchhammer - Tod in der Lausitz (2022)
An absolute travesty, and sadly, not even the funny kind.
I had zero expectations from this show, as I just wanted to pick up some average-looking German show to hone my German skills. 6 episodes, some kind of crime-mistery; why not? I lgenerally like those.
Oh boy, was I in for a great surprise! The whole show is basically a lecture about environment protection. Yes, you guessed it: a teenage girl completely stomps her parents and grandparents, because she's vegan and she hates coal, and she is the future and she's cool, unlike her lame and stupid parents and grandparents. Very cool. I just had one question: what does it have to do with the murder? Let me help you out in advance: nothing. This is pretty much a 6 episode long "coal is bad, meat is bad, save the planet" message, which needed something else going on to stretch the screentime, so throw in a murder, why not! Extremely dumb, extremely condescending. Don't worry, the final reveal about the murder is even worse! I had to pause the show because I had so much second-hand embarassment.
And I'm not even for coal or anything. I support a healthy environment, but either make a series about that, or a murder-mistery. These amateurs fused these in the worst possible way imaginable, which backfired horribly. I don't think I have ever had this much sympathy to evil coal-moguls than after watching this preachy show.
The skeleton of the whole series is bang average as well. Someone died ---> who done it? ---> the plot thickens ---> finale. It's extremely boring and holds no surprises. In fact, we are constantly being introduced to new characters, which absolutely destroys the fun of a show like this: the whole point would be to meet the cast early, and try to figure out who could've been the murderer and why.
The writing is atrocious. There are several sub-plots which go nowhere, gets unresolved, or has a random, unsatisfying endings.
The characters are boring, wooden, and other than the little boy, it's hard to care about them. The only character which was decently written was André. The male protagonist is as interesting as watching a paint try, though he has screen presence, I give him that.
The female lead was pretty much a cheap copy of the lead from The Bridge. She's on the spectrum, has bad social skills, but a great cop. Sadly, this cop is nothing special in her field, and her bad social skils are just awkward without any payoff. I was willing to bet my left leg after the first episode, that these terrible writers will copy the scene from The Bridge, where the detective woman whom they copied here, casually walks into a bar and asks a stranger if he wants to have sex with her. That was really funny in The Bridge. Don't worry, these writers totally butchered it here.
Honestly, I can't give a single reason why anyone should watch this. It does a terrible job at making you care about the environment, in fact, it makes you want to strangle that smug, condescending teenage girl, but it is also an extremely boring and slow murder-mistery with no surprises whatsoever.