Not long ago, even many critics saw fictional television as the art of lazy aesthetic compromises.

As a poor sibling of the admired cinema, one that begs for bread instead of creating cake creations with autonomous gestures.

With the streaming boom and series hype, the stereotype has changed, if not everywhere.

The new appreciation of the moving image may seem like something out of nowhere to some, but of course it has foundations and a remarkable history.

Matti Geschonneck is one of the most persistent, thoughtful and passionate representatives of so-called "quality television".

For almost three decades, his unmistakable signature as a director has stood for a concentrated, further and further developed television play that gives actors the creative freedom to explore the appearance and reality of relationships.

In the private as in the political.

There were years in the 2000s when almost every new TV film by Matti Geschonneck was showered with awards after it had been broadcast.

Years in which teleplay was considered the gold standard of the medium.

A solid formal framework, ninety minutes of concentrated arcs of suspense, sophisticated dramaturgy, elegant lines of dialogue, not a word too many and not a word too little, often in chamber play-like settings in which modern-looking, heteronormatively connected bourgeois couples could get on each other's nerves in a grandiose manner (as in " Silver Wedding", 2006), in which loved ones searched for missed truths (as in "Love Years", 2011), or a patriarch gathered all his loved ones to die self-determinedly, without wanting to acknowledge their own problems (as in "A Great Departure") , 2015).

Then juries sometimes found the works too dignified, almost too classic.

It is true that Geschonneck is a master of looking at needs tables, also in the light of the suspense genre.

After all, his television beginnings lie with the Berlin big city "Tatort" with Günter Lamprecht (they both wrote the screenplay together for "Geschlosse Akten" in 1994).

It could have turned out differently, and Matti Geschonneck would have stayed with the theater.

Born on May 8, 1952 in Potsdam as the son of the actor Erwin Geschonneck and named after his role in Brecht's "Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti", he studies directing in Moscow.

After Wolf Biermann's expatriation, Matti Geschonneck refuses to distance himself and has to give up his studies.

In 1978, two years after Biermann, he left the GDR for the Federal Republic, becoming assistant director to Eberhard Fechner and Thomas Langhoff, among others.

In 1992 he made his first feature film, "Moebius", and in 1993, his first "Tatort" was "Berlin - Beste Lage".

Numerous other "crime scenes", suspense films, adult relationship films and contemporary historical works follow, such as "Die Nachrichten" (2005,

with Jan Josef Liefers).

Geschonneck's realism is unsparing towards his characters, but mostly claims a certain aesthetic finesse of the film adaptation.

He has occasionally been accused of this.

"Television for everyone", as the former ZDF TV director and deputy program director Hans Janke put it, in any case Geschonneck enters into a love affair with (his) art that does not seek loneliness and the odd, but deliberate accessibility in one exciting story or an unusual criminal case.

Well-known actors such as Iris Berben, Barbara Auer, Hannelore Elsner, Katharina Lorenz, Christiane Paul, Matthias Habich, Thomas Thieme, Matthias Brandt and Charly Hübner, to name just a few, repeatedly cross paths with and against each other in Geschonneck , speaks for itself.

The topicality and diversity of the director Matti Geschonneck, who is married to the actress and director Ina Weisse,

In 2013, Geschonneck received the Grimme Prize for his life's work.

Which, fortunately, is far from over.

Today Matti Geschonneck is 70 years old.

Time to celebrate one of the best and most popular television directors in this country.