fEinkost is also available coarsely chopped. The goods only have to be fresh, optically perfect, of outstanding quality, a taste experience that tickles the buds. All that was the first season of the supermarket series “Die Discounter”, which was loosely produced by Christian Ulmen for Amazon based on the Dutch model “Vakkenfullers”, with crude humour, sexual plain language and wild scenes of disgust, which is now being produced with the same young team – writing and directing in in the hands of Oskar Belton, Emil Belton and Bruno Alexander – into the second season.
Already hailed as the future of German comedy, as a liberating blow because it is interspersed with so much nonchalant authenticity, precisely where it hurts the most, the makers could have buckled in the face of the high expectations. But that didn’t happen.
The new adventures from the battered branch of “Feinkost Kolinski” in Hamburg-Altona, which looks like supermarkets looked a good twenty years ago, are as young and cross-border, as anarchically funny and authentically sensitive as the massive opening – and even better told. Only towards the end of the season does the inner tension subside a little: a big competition finale against two other Kolinski branches, that’s a lot of comedic script routine for the otherwise wonderfully fragmented plot. The impulse to bring all love relationships to a conclusion – sometimes romantic, sometimes fatal (incest) – is understandable, but all too common in the genre.
Otherwise, however, “Die Discounter” shows how a refreshingly spontaneous-looking series about a team growing together in the face of common enemies (customers, competitors, health authorities) can be created with a small budget, high speed and good-humored youthful energy. This includes everyone talking the way people of this age actually do (and that’s more than “Digga” and “Bro”): “I’ll go with that for sure.” “Mega chilled.”
Center of the branch: failure boss Thorsten Kruse is cunningly friendly and determined to use every shameful deed.
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Image: Amazon
At the center of the Kolinski universe is still the cunningly friendly boss Thorsten Kruse, a lovable bastard (type Stromberg), fantastically played by Marc Hosemann, who is determined to use him for any outrage. As the conscientious, eye-rolling and valued employee Pina (Klara Lange) correctly recognized at the end of the first season, Thorsten is “not at all suitable for this post”, but “the one who holds everyone together”.
Unappetizing and honest
With the exception of Pinas, his employees, badly paid and permanently kicked off, don’t give a damn about work ethic and career thinking. They rob the market wherever they can and are a kind of living antidote to the fetish character of the commodity world. Food (of the worst kind) has rarely been staged in such an unappetizing and honest way. And the customer who insists on being given twelve cents because the sign with the sausage product discount was not removed in time (“I’ll stay here until I get my money”) is a chilling copy of reality.
Even Titus, the high school graduate, doesn’t know what to do next. He is played by Bruno Alexander himself, and quite convincingly. One believes that he has a guilty conscience because of his training and feels comfortable among his colleagues: Peter (Ludger Bökelmann), who covers up his vulnerability through aggression and cockiness, the quick-witted and sex-obsessed Flora (Nura Habib Omer), the completely useless security officer Jonas (Merlin Sandmeyer ) and of course the flirtatious Lia (Marie Bloching), with whom Titus is obviously in love. The Belton twins once again play their nasty, unsympathetic colleagues from Eimsbüttel.
There are also guest appearances this time. Sometimes Kida Khodr Ramadan and his buddy Frederick Lau want to sell their “Buddy Wine” (“not the snot that Joko and such shit do here”) using mafia methods: “A hundred bottles are gone tonight, Digga !” Sometimes – and not only that – the female workforce kicks with a very well-known soccer player who happens to be shopping while the men in the warehouse are roaring and watching soccer. They, in turn, earned it by sitting through a spontaneous workshop on gender equality, even if its messages didn’t seem to have caught on completely. In any case, Peter continues to consider himself a feminist because he always makes sure “that the woman also comes during sex”.
There’s a lot of silly here, but the silly has a certain dignity because it actually helps to explore the characters. And since it is a mockumentary, like “Stromberg”, i.e. a fictional documentary format in which the characters take a stand individually in interviews, there is a second narrative level that expands, counteracts or recaptures the first. In terms of narrative, “Die Discounter” has thus detached itself strongly from the Dutch model with its constantly over-the-top web format humor; only every now and then an attitude or an idea is similar (trial stand).
Still, that doesn’t mean it should go on indefinitely. Repetitions and sags can already be noticed. The heroin-addicted homeless man in front of the door, the top-up pensioners Wilhelm (Wolfgang Michael) and Mrs. Jensen (Doris Kunstmann), that’s bargain humor close to the end of the minimum durability. The catastrophes of an average supermarket, which are well-founded in everyday life and only therefore really funny, are gradually all simply told; in a third season it would probably finally become a commercially available comedy soap. But the current season is once again a magnificent shopping experience.
The second season of The discounters is available on Amazon Prime Video from November 11th.
