Welcome to the future
The entire film industry is looking for just the one great series idea that will allow them to catch up with the great contemporary American series. The magic word is “horizontal storytelling”, i.e. the seamless narrative transition from one episode to the next. For years, the major German television series refused to follow this principle because the broadcasters wanted to retain the freedom to “reprogramme” the series as they saw fit, i.e. to broadcast the episodes in reruns in a wild jumble.
But regardless of the industry hype, one genre has always told a hard-hitting horizontal story – often over several years: the daily soap. The Bavarian daily “Dahoam is Dahoam“, for which I have been writing scripts and storylines for a long time, has now been broadcast in over 1600 episodes, with the storylines and scripts extending a good 100 episodes further. Since 2007, the story of the inhabitants of the fictional town of Lansing has been told week after week; it’s like a big experiment that is told in real time, but above all strictly horizontally.
After writing a series of storylines for the production over the autumn, called “Futures” in internal jargon, I was able to take part in the so-called “Future Weekend” for the first time this weekend. A total of twelve authors got their heads spinning in beautiful Altomünster and developed ideas together on how to continue the storylines of the Lansingers in the coming quarter.
Many thanks to the great Polyscreen team, it was fantastic.
