It is the beginning of November and the temperatures have dropped significantly below zero.

Good for those who now have a warm roof over their heads.

But not much longer.

First the displays of the power plant generators in Saxony go off at night, then the lights go out in Brandenburg.

The power grid is dead. In Leipzig, a fully occupied roller coaster hangs upside down in the amusement park.

The interior minister doesn't get it

Interior Ministry employee Frauke Michelsen (Marie Leuenberger) waits in vain at the Berlin train station for the ICE with her unaccompanied twin daughters. He stopped on the open road with no cell phone reception and no heating. Interior Minister Severin (Herbert Knaup) still considers the widespread failure to be a trifle. If no one can post selfies or use the bathroom for the next ten minutes, well. The systems are safe. Order the network operators and remind them of their obligations. However, they do not find the cause and reject responsibility.

Should a national emergency be declared? There is a conflict of competence, the public remains in the dark in two senses. Nuclear power plants indicate dangerous malfunctions. There are too few generators for the emergency supply. Those responsible are naive and haphazard. In the middle of it hovers a Federal Chancellor who seems as remote as a technology-believing demiurge who thought he had abolished doom. Initially, only one individual believed in a terrorist attack, a cross-border hacker problem, who was soon hunted as the main suspect by international security organs and the gnarled German specialist Jürgen Hartlandt (Heiner Lauterbach): the computer scientist Pierre Manzano (Moritz Bleibtreu), a lonely, dubious figure with a criminal Past, pizza delivery boy on probation and disappointed anarchist,whose dreams of revolution ended in police violence at the G-8 summit in Genoa 20 years ago.

Complex heroic figures are always better in terms of narrative economics than one-dimensional light figures, and it is not only in this respect that the six-part catastrophe series “Blackout” (Joyn +) does some things right.

The topicality of the subject of electricity dependency cannot be denied.

The topic of cybersecurity, the protection of critical systems, is on the agenda like never before.

At the same time, most of them have no idea how the underlying technology works.

Disinformation and feelings of insecurity not only feed the “prepper” scene.

Fictional egg-laying woolly milk pig

Widely ramified with many subplots moving, “Blackout” is a kind of fictional egg-laying woolly milk pig. Not just a meticulously researched environmental and political thriller, but a series with the claim "Thriller Plus": A socially critical report of disintegration, he offers various family psychological constellations (Michelsen's ex-husband [Axel Barry Atsma], an irresponsible artist, ergo epitome of the egoist, looking for the children and his lost happiness), and last but not least, he also shows horror kitsch with fairy tale motifs (Michelsen's children are taken away by a butcher who sharpens their knives by candlelight and later leads them deep into the eerie forest like Hansel and Gretel from time to time).

The original is the bestseller "Blackout - Tomorrow is too late" by Marc Elsberg from 2012, because this production by Wiedemann & Berg is a film, a book of more than 800 pages, a three-digit number of characters appears. The script by Lancelot by Naso (also directing, together with Oliver Rihs) and Kai-Uwe Hasenheit focuses the action again and again on the characters Manzano and Michelsen. The fact that he is allowed to be dubious in the race against the chaos and that she is merely a leadership icon with a value compass like from the management seminar is only negligible because Marie Leuenberger wrestles many nuances from her role.

Here and there there are compromises in the image design (camera Kolja Brandt and Jann Doeppert). Few extras do not unleash a street battle with Hollywood dimensions. It is remarkable that people are reluctant to portray violence. Unfortunately, the same reluctance applies to the painting of international scenes. All over the European continent, the power fails here. In the mountains the cows scream in pain because the electric milking system is on strike. In the hospital, a doctor gives a fatal dose to patients who cannot be transported. Triage is becoming part of everyday life, there is a fight for gasoline down to the blood, people freeze to death, starve to death. In Berlin, the Chancellor decides to refuse humanitarian aid from Russia, mountains of rubbish are growing in the streets."Blackout" convincingly shows the consequences of a possible general power failure. With Jessica Schwarz, Stephan Kampwirth, Hannah Hoekstra, Claudio Caiolo, Francis Fulton-Smith and many more, the series will find a large audience, at the latest next year when it is broadcast on Sat.1.

Blackout

runs on the Joyn + portal.