This article originally appeared on the launch of "Hackerville" on TNT Series in November 2018.

The opening credits of this series are a sensation in their own right: cat paws dangling along a keyboard, a programming code races across the screen, the lights in the apartments of a Romanian prefabricated housing estate are gradually coming to an end. From a bird's-eye view, the living silos suddenly look like the electronic components of a computer, the shining and blinking city is viewed from above to the computer board. Not a minute, then the idea of ​​"Hackerville" is clear: The whole world is a single circuit.

The story goes like this: A bank in Frankfurt is hacked, 9.99 euros are stolen. A gag? A warning? A warm-up for a bigger attack? The hack came from computers in the Romanian Timisoara, the Department of Cybercrime of the Federal Criminal Police Office sends Lisa Metz (Anna Schumacher) to the source of the threat. The investigator is German-Romanian, her investigations are also used to research their own family history.

On-site Metz gets help from policeman Adam Sandor (Andi Vasluianu), the two come across the 14-year-old gamer Cipi (Voicu Dumitras), who programmed their own games and easily get behind any firewall. The boy is also hot on the heels of an organization committed to international cybercrime. Cipi, the cyber prodigy, is to crack high-security computer systems for her.

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Hacker series: Life is not a game

As pointed the plot sounds, it has a real background: For a few years now, the Romanian city of Râmnicu Vâlcea has been regarded as the center of cybercrime, in reports it is repeatedly referred to as the "most dangerous city on the Internet". From here, young hackers launch their attacks around the world.

Eighth graders hack the traffic light system

The series moves that "Hackerville" now into the slightly larger Timisoara and shows how here already eighth-graders in high-end Internet cafes hack the local traffic light system to manipulate the red and green phases and provoke quite a few clashes. Later, to solve the case, the investigators must play an FPS game programmed by Cipi, the Internet's most dangerous child, with reference to Timisoara's topography. One sits at the computer, the other must run through the real city.

The fact that "Hackerville" does not degenerate into a cyber pistol, despite all the desire for a gamer stand magic (and despite slight hang-ups in the digital cat-and-mouse game in the middle section), is also due to how carefully the worlds are interlocked - the virtual with the real, the Romanian with the German.

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In "Hackerville" is also the history of Romanian Germans negotiated, the ethnic group that was ransomed by the federal government from the 1970s and 1980s from the Ceausescu dictatorship. Thus, in the context of the high-speed digitization of Romanian society, one of the great but almost forgotten migratory movements on the continent emerges. Leading actress Anna Schumacher is German-Romanian, Anca Miruna Lazarescu ("The Journey with Father"), one of the directors, is a Romanian who grew up in Germany. For them, shooting in Timisoara meant a return to their birthplace after decades of absence.

"Hackerville" exemplifies how modern European serial television can look on a booming TV market. This week she will be released on DVD. It was developed by Jörg Winger and Ralph Martin, who had already worked together for the spy series "Deutschland86", as producers were Cristian Mungiu and Tudor Reu, with the award-winning abortion drama "4 months, 3 weeks, two days" a new Romanian cinema realism in have worn the world.

In search of the "new shit"

In "Hackerville" there is a scene in which one of the cybercriminals pretends to be the ambassador of a record company that is supposedly looking for interesting hip-hop acts in the former Eastern bloc. He is looking for the "New Shit". That could also be said of the US broadcaster HBO, who wrote series history with "Sopranos" and "Game of Thrones" and is now looking over its dependency HBO Europe for fabrics and cooperation partners for the hungry series market on both sides of the Atlantic.

HBO Europe has already released the gritty Romanian detective series "Umbre". For "Hackerville" the television provider now cooperates with the small station TNT series, which has proven with its own productions such as the fantasy thriller "Weinberg" and the first season of the gangster saga "4 Blocks" as one of the first that German genre television can work , There will be a coveted trophy at the Grimme Awards Ceremony in Marl this Friday.

Because the cyberthriller drives the format series into new regions - and that also geographically. After the telecom disaster "German-Les-Landes", which raises German-French clichés in series, the transnational narrative opens up new facets of perhaps not so strange living worlds. All of Europe is a circuit, it just needs to be powered up.