Exclusive Interview

“Germany needs stories of its own”

They are producing and going for the European markets.

Special from Berlin by Guido Neubert.

	Dr. Michael Esser

he great success of Verliebt in Berlin (In love in Berlin) –the adaptation of the Colombian telenovela Yo soy Betty la fea– showed the way to a brilliant future for telenovelas in this country.
Dr. Michael Esser –head writer of Verliebt in Berlin– gave Only Telenovelas, Fiction & Formats an exclusive interview and spoke about all the details.
Bianca had woken up the audiences. It was the first locally produced telenovela in Germany and was broadcasted on ZDF –the second public channel– starting the boom of German telenovelas in 2004. We asked Esser:
Compared with the Latin American market, why did it take so long to produce local telenovelas for the German TV?
“This is in the first place due to the very special German TV market system with a powerful public TV sector and a private sector that was divided between two main players and was politically wanted. Public TV has always been very cautious with format innovation because its audience is mainly among the older population. Private TV saw its role for a long time in either showing American products or home-produced series that tried to live up to the standards set by the United States industry, and it stood there. But there were far looking people like UFA’s CEO Wolf Bauer, who tried to promote telenovelas for a long time but didn’t find interest with his TV network partners,” explains Esser.
“On the other hand, the TV market stopped growing, and that together with a general fear about how the internet would influence on TV audiences worked as door openers to new ideas and the choice of new products that could be produced with low budgets like reality shows. When the market shares for these products began to decrease, the time was ripe for telenovelas.”

	In love in Berlin

Latin American telenovelas on the German screens
Did the direct import from the Latin American market work or was it only a necessarily process in preparation for the first German productions?
“Slave Isaura, from Globo, and Salome, from Televisa did not really work out with German audiences. This was due to a completely different approach to storytelling and character building. German audiences are very used to realistic stories. Latin American telenovelas were far too drastic and were mind boggling for the biggest part of German audiences because they didn’t feel this stories like real enough. People thought they were artificial or sort of camp.”

Made in Germany
Which are the reasons for the singular success of the first German telenovela Bianca?
“There was a big lack in real storytelling in German TV. The audiences’ demand for realism made TV programmers shy back from fairy-tale-like stories. However, in certain TV movies you could see that romantic comedies and melodramas found their audiences, but still the courage was to be found to try this kind of fictional colour with a long running series.”

	Bianca

Esser assures that there is a very dramatic absence of instinct to be noted with German TV network executives. “Market research is a very big issue but you simply cannot research what you yourself do not know and thus cannot test with your audiences,” he remarks. “Our executives often are –or believe they are– intellectuals and they behave snobbish with everything that can be suspected to be popular. At the beginnings of private TV activities in Germany, Helmut Thoma –who founded RTL Television– had already showed the German entertainment business that TV works best when it does what people want it to do: entertain. But it wasn’t until the next crisis after the new economy boom that the network executives finally began to understand that there is a difference between what they believe is entertaining and what their audiences would feel entertained by.
Why didn’t you just buy the original production of Yo soy Betty la fea instead of choosing the long process of adapting and producing this success in Germany?
“It would have been impossible to present anything even only close to Betty la fea to a German audience because they wouldn’t have understood or accepted it.”
What have been the main changes you have done to the story throughout the adaptation process?
“We took the main characters and the set-up in the fashion business and from there we went our own way. Yo soy Betty la fea is hilarious, is screwball and far too melodramatic to be devoured by any European audience. We softened it pushed it closer to reality to make it a romantic comedy with a humorous approach.”
Which direction will telenovelas head to in your country? 
“They will be successful even if one of the next telenovelas that are about to be aired is a flop. The desire for stories with a beginning, an end and a strong dramatic development will be unbroken.”
Do you see in the future more possibilities to co-produce with Latin America? 
“Series are always very national products in Europe. And there are no production companies strong enough to promote a series without the backing of a network, and these, though, do not see any need in producing transnational formats.”
How do you think the commercialization from German telenovelas to other countries will work?
“Verliebt Berlin has been sold in France and the format rights saw a lot of interest as far as I have heard. It is more likely that formats will sell more than produced series.
How important is the development of telenovelas for your firm, Dramaworks? 
Development is King I would say. With telenovelas it is of enormous importance for production companies to keep up a steady development activity. Dramaworks has specialized in development for five years and we began to scan telenovela formats three years ago. So we are well ahead in the business and of course ready to share our knowledge with everybody who hires us.
 Michael Esser set up his own firm Dramaworks in the year 2000, establishing a company that develops scripts for television and movie contents. Among other activities, Dramaworks cooperates with the University of Milan and other partners on a virtual authoring tool, financed by EU research funds. He has worked for Grundy UFA in Potsdam since July 2004 as head writer for one of the first German telenovelas: Verliebt in Berlin.