A bookseller has disappeared, one morning she is no longer in the house, to the horror of her children.

In fact, the alarm bells should be ringing all the time.

But that's the perfidious thing about the series "Neuland", which is absolutely worth seeing: The drama recedes into the background as soon as the police have been informed and the first stack of leaflets with Alexandra's photo has been hung up.

For a while, the six-part series camouflages itself as a soap opera with sunny townscapes, brave smiling faces and perfectly furnished houses about four women on the verge of a mid-life crisis, their families and a catastrophe that ties their stories together.

The media woman Anke (Anneke Kim Sarnau) makes a career in Hamburg, the journalist Sarah (Mina Tander) runs a regional online magazine for families on her own, the architect Marie (Peri Baumeister) plans the extension of the Astrid Lindgren elementary school.

And the Bundeswehr soldier Karen (Franziska Hartmann) is also approaching.

She is on assignment in Mali - but her sister Alexandra was a single parent, and somehow things have to go on with the young Lea (Lene Oderich) and the slightly younger Zoe (Aennie Lade).

Soon the nerves at school are on edge.

There is a fight that doesn't quite fit the declared Bullerbü ideal, and the class teacher Sophie Petzold (Angelina Häntsch) actually has the nerve to expect her own child shortly before the most important children in the world move to high school.

You can't talk soberly about something like that with helicopter mothers from Sünnfleth.

"How much horror is actually in the hipster?"

In the thin-skinned reactions to the schoolyard dispute and the pregnancy, it becomes apparent for the first time who the screenwriter Orkun Ertener, who in 2007 invented the true-to-life series "Kriminaldauerdienst" that overwhelms the traditional audience, feels the pulse here: a society obsessed with self-portrayal and self-optimization, which when in doubt becomes unscrupulous.

Just take the publisher Anke, who rules over a magazine empire.

To ward off defamatory allegations against her son Lukas (Cooper Dillon), she cold-bloodedly sends a journalist to Sarah's partner Erik Stein (Steve Windolf);

he is an actor and immediately loses his jobs as a result of the following MeToo headlines.

"How much horror is actually in the hipster?" Orkun Ertener rightly asks in the accompanying material.

The answer is: very much.

Because behind the facades of the hygge world things are getting more and more intense.

As superficial as "Neuland" appears at the beginning, the series now deals with the psyche of its characters in depth (director: Jens Wischnewski), and that includes the children's roles.

Tormented by trauma

It is therefore difficult to speak of a main character.

If there is one, it is the reserved military police officer Karen, who moves in foreign territory in her parental life just as much as she does in Afghanistan or Mali.

She is played by Franziska Hartmann, who has just appeared in the guilt drama "Kalt" and in the crime thriller "Katharina Tempel", both harrowing films, and here, too, stands out with her extremely fine facial expressions.

This Karen is still, tormented by a trauma that is certainly to be expected in the story of a German soldier on a mission abroad.

But it explains why Karen is more empathetic than initially thought when dealing with the children of her absent sister Alexandra and the refugee boy Rami (Omran Saleh).

If her sister, who sometimes sits next to her as a ghost, just fled - Karen might even understand that, because she fled herself when she was left to care for her terminally ill mother.

In principle, this also applies to the other characters: In this multi-layered series, which occasionally makes you think of the dark satire "Big Little Lies" due to the setting, but is absolutely no laughing matter, every woman and every man is exhausted to an extent in which one occasionally begins to yearn for the leap into another life.

And everyone is under a pressure that even among the youngest leads to outbreaks of violence.

A psychologically very carefully and plausibly developed multi-family drama that becomes more and more gripping in the second half.

Neuland

begins on December 27th at 10:15 p.m. on ZDF and is available in the ZDF media library.