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Joko Winterscheidt in his new show: the parody of a shame

Photo: Paul Ripke / Prime Video

It's like the solar-powered car at the beginning of the show: first it whizzes through the sunlit American prairie with Joko Winterscheidt in the cockpit to future-oriented autotune sounds, then it abruptly stops on the open track, and the presenter suddenly has the detached steering wheel in his hand.

This sums up quite well the design principle of »The World's Most Dangerous Show«, for which Winterscheidt jetted halfway around the world with a large team: dreamlike passages about futuristic world-saving technologies are inevitably followed by traumatic reality checks. The Amazon Prime series is a show with built-in self-flagellation: Joko plays Joko and licks his teeth confident of victory - only to be epically ashamed and grieved afterwards.

That's ecotainment! One is asked to laugh at how the self-proclaimed eco-hero gets a bloody nose in ever new ways. It's a bit like the ProSieben hit "Duell um die Welt" (Duel around the World), except that Joko is now not fighting Klaas, but with half-finished technique and difficult anglicisms. Holistic Grazing« and »Direct air capture« are two of them.

Winterscheidt sniffs the shit of happy cattle in Northern California, eagerly explains how carbon dioxide is removed from the air in Iceland, and nibbles on chicken McNuggets made from artificial meat in Silicon Valley with a connoisseur's expression.

But there is a catch to everything. The techniques are either not fully developed, or their benefits are still so small that the impact on climate protection is zero.

Parody of a shaman

Winterscheidt is also an entrepreneur. He has been investing in green companies for a long time; He has been thinking about developing a show on the topics of climate protection and sustainability for almost as long. But until recently, he refrained from the idea because he was afraid that the corporations and start-ups, which inevitably have to be involved in such an undertaking, would use their appearances for greenwashing.

Winterscheidt's new show can't really be accused of this: While he splashes around in geysers in Iceland, strokes calves in California and smells, rubs and sucks like a shaman's parody of all kinds of bushes, grasses and soil, the advantages and disadvantages of the new technologies are often weighed up in compact passages. The host plays the start-up cheerleader here, but in the end he consistently opens up the cost-benefit calculation of green engineering.

Winterscheidt emphasizes that Amazon Prime gave him carte blanche in the six-part show project. He uses it to talk openly about his concerns about the insatiable online shipping monster in the very first episode, which of course he doesn't call that after all. In the second episode, Luisa Neubauer expresses the production contradiction of the whole undertaking more clearly: "Amazon is not a corporation that I would normally associate with sustainability and tax justice, but with exploitation and tax avoidance."

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However, carte blanche does not only mean the freedom of critical design, but also the apparently opulent production budget. Whether this has always been used wisely is questionable. In the very first episode, Winterscheidt and his team visit multi-billionaire Bill Gates at his estate. However, it has nothing else to offer than a few green platitudes and the tip to take a look at the company in Iceland, which is at the forefront of "direct air capture".

It may be that this startles a few very simple Blackrock investors. But for the fat ecological footprint left by the trip to Gates, that's a shockingly small ecological impact.

Conscience calls

Winterscheidt himself agrees. Shortly after the Gates interview, he sits at home with a wrinkled face and takes a call. Then he says, "That was my conscience." He was asked: "Did you really fly halfway around the globe with your team, wouldn't a phone call to Bill Gates have been enough?" With his radical self-questioning, Winterscheidt goes further than many similar formats. The question is whether the audience can productively implement this self-questioning for themselves.

It's like the mother who calls long after you move out, asking you to dress warmly, winter is coming. One assures to act. We love our mothers, we hold something on our conscience. Nevertheless, we run out of the door again without a scarf.

»Joko Winterscheidt Presents: The World's Most Dangerous Show« is streaming on Amazon Prime Video