TAEMO Review of Der König von St. Pauli

Der König von St. Pauli (1998– )

When I first saw it on Sat1 in 1998 it was okay, now on Amazon in 2021 it is pretty average..

[5/10 · 16 February 2021]

Here is why it is bad and this review is mainly based on the first episode. Should I be able to get through more, I will change this review to a general one and post this as a review attached to the first episode. Also, before we start, rumour had it back then that Dieter Wedel fired the original director because his scenes were unusable and stepped in to direct the show himself. I don't know if this is true or when Wedel took over, but if this show was shot in sequence and the first episode or parts of it is the work of the original director then may be that's the explanation why this is so bad. Also scenes tend to get better at the end of the episode and the staging is more natural , the line delivery not as overacted. Firstly the staging of the scenes and the framing of the shots look just awful. Maybe the reason for the latter is the change from 4:3 to 16:9 on Amazon, but it is just no fun watching it. The staging is also so uninspired and not logical. They try to kill Kranzow by throwing him into the harbour. And the reason he is almost killed is not the way he smashes into the water, or that he cannot swim or the current; It is because he swallows too much of the dirty water and he cannot really swim somehow but survives at least 5 minutes until they send a rescue ship. And the killers know he might not die and survive but they also assume he will not talk when they hear that he might live? Yet they make a second halfass attempt on his live. Okay much of what I just wrote was maybe also a writing problem and the reason they are only halfass attempts is because he has to come back half way through the show when his son has taken over so there can be conflict and a reconnection with his son. But the assassination attempts look ridiculous. First the attempt in the harbour then the second one in the hospital. The killer behaves so suspiciously and the reason nobody saw him, was because there is only one nurse for 80 patients. Okay the explanation is also writing. The following scene with his son explaining to the nurse who his fathers is in the underworld reminded me of the Godfather. The problem again is the writing because the son talks so stilted and not how real people would talk. Also almost every scene before that told us how big his father is in the Hamburg underworld or party mile and how prestigious his his club is, yet when we see the club it looks like a small beephole, the guests in it look bored and the dancers are not very professional. Most of the actors are well known German actors but they somehow cannot deliver. Even Heinz Hoenig who got a great career boost from this show is pretty bad in this first episode especially in his first scenes where he overacts completely. Sonja Kirchberger is hot, but not that good, Oliver Hasenfratz is not even present in the scenes he is in. And it is also so plain obvious that we are on a backlot. The entire scenery looks cheap. Okay now we jumped from writing to acting to production values and design in two sentences but it is very difficult to write a structured review when the entire episode is all over the place.