The Herzogpark, one of the most expensive districts in the already priceless Munich, is located north-east of the city center between the Isar and the Hochufer and, viewed from the perspective of Google Maps, has the shape of a cucumber, elongated and slightly curved - with the residents of the Herzogpark taking this comparison: too ordinary, too cheap, too rough for the more discerning tastes of the people here.

Claudius Seidl

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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If you walk through the streets of the quarter, you might come across Poschingerstraße, the replica of the villa that Thomas Mann had built here almost 110 years ago.

The Ifo Institute is located a few houses down, and the Hanser Verlag is located around the corner. And on the northern edge of the quarter was the “Grüntal” until ten years ago, an inn with a beautiful garden, snooty waiters and a menu that was sophisticated Munich food promised, but the kitchen was less and less able to keep it, which is why the Jaguars in the parking lot were fewer and fewer.

The tavern yielded too little for the demands of the real estate owner;

on the site of the "green valley" there is now an apartment house that the developers want to call "Leisure Living" - and anyone who has come across the website that was supposed to market the project in recent years could, given the pathetic, but all the louder texts of praise, just think: Aha, the times when the Herzogpark was also called "Klein Weimar" and a subscription to an opera premiere and a library to be taken seriously were the prerequisites if someone wanted to belong here, seem to be finally over.

The fine art of insult

And so it is perhaps only realistic if the people who live in the Herzogpark in the RTL series "Herzogpark" are rich (or at least pretend to be), but mostly also dressed too loudly, too directly and a bit too vulgarly for the traditional Munich conditions.

And only when the screenwriters had a very bright moment, i.e. once or twice per episode, do they have the ability that is one of the most important status characteristics of Munich's better people: in soft, bourgeois singsong and with flawless politeness strong malice so too formulate that the offended person initially thinks they have been complimented.

This variant of the dialect, which sounds like Maximilianstrasse and the Salzburg Festival Hall, is mastered in the series by only one person, the non-Bavarian Heiner Lauterbach.

He plays the villain, a real estate entrepreneur who is threatened with bankruptcy, against which he tries to defend himself with all criminal means.

Not a bad premise actually as the basis of a series;

the Munich real estate market can only be described as a system of insanity - even trying to get a terraced house from the fifties at an affordable price had enough absurd potential to provide a six-part mini-series with wit, desperation and anger.

But this series knows as much about the economic reality of the city in which it is set as it does about the cultural and social aspects: zero point zero.

Which, however, would not be a defect if the screenplay and staging could contrast this reality with a world that would be bigger, more colorful and more dangerous.

The "Monaco Franze" was not a work of realism either, but rather Helmut Dietl's Munich vision conceived in Hollywood.

Blackmailers must die

And the ambition of this series seems to be heading in exactly this direction: the Herzogpark as a ducal jungle.

Beverly Hills on the Isar, with huge modern villas, large pools in the gardens and interiors that show that the interior designer unfortunately could not take the taste of the residents into account.

The residents are aesthetically at the level of their living rooms - whereby it is primarily about the residents: three women who, like Macbeth's witches, would prefer to appear together and would also like to be just as dangerous.

Each of them has a score to settle with the real estate man, which is why they want to poison him, shoot him, kill him or at least starve him in a dungeon, which is not that easy.

And because the man two of the three women with pictures of venal,

blackmailed into sex that is forbidden or otherwise perceived as deviant, the series at least undermines a realism that was possibly not intended at all: in the digital age, the publication of the pictures is simply not enough.

The blackmail isn't over until the blackmailer is dead.

As a story of a murder that just won't go through, "Herzogpark" is quite entertaining - and when in one of the first episodes a dinner party gets completely out of hand, when first the real estate man's wife gets a liquid poured over the dress and then just this dress undresses and sits almost naked as if it were the most normal thing;

when a moment later two men start choking each other, and even the contents of a large vase can scarcely stop them;

So when the expensive dining room and all the guests are left in a state of devastation at the end, then you realize that German television, with its limited resources, is at least trying to reenact Buñuel's "discreet charm of the bourgeoisie".

However, the means remain limited because there is nowhere to be seen an abyss.

It's like allowing the usual eight-fifteen staff to finally be really depraved, nasty, and uninhibitedly pleasure-seeking.

A depth does not come into play, and certainly not a moral challenge for the viewers.

After all, "Herzogpark" is faster and more enjoyable than most of what German television otherwise allows itself to do.

Herzogpark

is on RTL+ from today.