1. You can see the sweat and the torment. Neither Sasha nor Tim Mälzer are pulse-shaped fitness machines, after the first game in which they have to hit nails in a plank, they wheeze over arm pain.
And that one likes to see, even if that is of course fed by the lowest Gafflust: otherwise velvet-bedecked and check-cleaned celebs, the drift a little to our amusement. Mälzer quickly turns out to be the perfect steam locomotive that needs a program that can take five hours or more: a sweating railcar that seethes, gasps, drools and literally whistles from the last hole.
Of course this reminds of show father Stefan Raab, the pumping cockchafer, and is the counter model to always boiled-aseptic acting ex-host Steffen Henssler. Mälzer roars "Fickscheiße!" and scolds a table tennis ball that does not blow where he should, as "stupid bastard". If he bends down unhappily, you can already see his gaping buttocks fold under the slipped pants. This is not all appetizing, but - see the lowest Gafflust - just also reliably entertaining.
2. The sympathy dramaturgy is right. What a buffalo head, one thinks in the first half hour, when maltsters prollomäßig told at the prelude nail match, he could not even independently change a light bulb: "I am the female at home".
His opponent Sasha has an easy game to present in contrast super-friendly and fully majority. One settles in comforting glee, as Mälzer loses the first five rounds in series - until the sympathies eventually move almost unnoticed, because malting continues to work terrier and fails and rackets and thus offers so much disarming identification area.
Is Sasha actually very nice, but also: just very nice? Like a charged particle between two plates, the sympathy rushes back and forth between the candidates on this evening, which maintains the emotional tension.
3. One learns surprising details about the candidates. For instance, when Mälzer succeeds in "embarrassing or cashiering" with Rosamunde-Pilcher and "Traumschiff" connoisseurship and glazes up with a fine lard, as if he were a splendid piglet on a show buffet.
4. There are enough entry and exit passages. Staying really long and linear on a show is no longer used by viewers who are completely overrun by streaming offers and media libraries.
Ideally, a mammoth format like "hit the star" works like a hop-on-hop-off bus tour: in between, there are always passages where you get off for a short while, smear a slice, go with the dog, and not really miss anything decisive because in the meantime, only very long balloons are attacked with nailed model cars.
And there are docking games, which facilitate the re-entry, because you can play in the head: For example, the game of numbers, in which the opponents in words formulated numbers - about four billion twenty-four fifty-four - have to translate back into digits. And mercilessly fail because they regularly forget a few places.
5. The perfect ending is a mild controversy. Just like at the end of an opulent, very long multi-course dinner, the whole of the food is still sealed with a final piece of Stinky Cheese. After the ideal show finale, a very fine, barely noticeable aftertaste will keep the event in your memory even longer.
In the decisive game, the candidates have to climb onto a kind of scaffold and from there on up a very long thread without the help of the hands in their mouth. There are complications: Did the victorious Sasha unlawfully suck the tail of the thread? Would you have to give maltsters the win and give him the chance to win the € 100,000 prize money in another round - or were the rules just not explained exactly enough before, and Sasha could not know that he acted contrary to the rules?
Elton decides to repeat, Sasha wins again and beats maltsters, the show is over.
When one wakes up on Sunday morning and thinks first of all, if that was not a bit unfair, that Sasha once wound the thread on his tongue, then bundled it into his mouth - then the absurdity cocoon of the previous evening stops in which one watched for five hours, as a cook in a row of nonsense against a singer began, still a small, happy while tight. Before the unbelievable everyday life perforates him mercilessly and lets the real life penetrate.
You can not expect more from a Saturday night show.