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Henning Baum as Matti Adler: Showdown at Ballermann
Photo: Pep Bonet / RTL
Did the real reunion take place over the beer mugs at Ballermann?
In the better moments of the series »Der König von Palma«, which is largely set in the World Cup and reunification year 1990, Mallorca comes across as a gigantic German-German melting pot.
The schnauzers of the Ruhr area fraternize with mullets from Saxony, the clinking of glasses mixes with the most wonderful dialects that can be heard between Bottrop and Bitterfeld.
Blissfully drunk brothers and sisters, dehydrated German bodies in harmony, glowing landscapes - in this series year 1990, Playa de Palma is almost the paradise that Helmut Kohl promised his people in the real year 1990 and then never really became a reality is.
Right in the middle of this all-German Garden of Eden: Matti Adler (Henning Baum), ex-car salesman from Dortmund with Rudi-Völler-Löckchen on his neck, who dreams of his own beer garden at Ballermann, and Bianca Bärwald (Pia-Micaela Barucki), Schlager fan from Leipzig, which is dumped here by a flat-rate airline and does not come away again.
She helps the other to open a shop, which he calls "Beer Eagle" in reference to his last name.
The bird acts as the heraldic animal for the pub logo.
The locals watch critically and put obstacles in the way of the newcomers wherever they can - but they don't let that get them down: In "Der König von Palma" Wessis and Ossis go under the beer and federal eagle together against the Mallorcan gastronomy mafia.
Alone against the Mallorcans
And when things didn't go well with the guests at the beginning because of the locals' acts of sabotage, Schlager-Ultra Bianca simply spoke to Costa Cordalis, who was stranded on the island, and then did a half-playback appearance in "Bieradler".
Shows by Tony Marshall and Jürgen Drews follow.
Costa Cordalis, who died in Mallorca in 2019, is played by his son Lucas Cordalis as a figurehead.
Unfortunately, the figure of the Greek pop singer remains the only positive non-German character.
You also have to manage first: to shoot a six-part film in Spain in which all Spaniards really look and speak like criminals.
It is possible that the showrunner duo Veronica Priefer and Johannes Kunkel simply looked for the wrong model for their thriller trash because it was too big: the artwork, with which the production, which runs first on RTL + and then in the linear program of the broadcaster network, is advertised, is reminiscent of the posters for Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood" and the actually sleek opening credits with its surf sound on the title sequence of "Pulp Fiction".
With the
Ballermann Fiction
à la RTL, only the comic-like exaggerated parts of the gangster roles remain for the Mallorcans.
Minipli-Männeken as a model medium-sized company
Devious brewers, corrupt police officers and, no joke, shell players make it difficult for Matti Adler and his German entourage to run his shop.
Overslept and gluttonous Mallorcan officials are also added to this.
With a flying, open Hawaiian shirt, the Dortmund restaurateur braces himself against cops and beer drivers.
His Balearic nemesis is an oily disco operator who, in a white suit, sinks his unwelcome competition into the sea from his yacht.
Compared to such a figment of lascivious Latino vulgarity, the robust Minipli mannequin Adler, despite all the chubbiness, seems like the prime example of an honorable German medium-sized company.
Once upon a time in... Palma: nothing against a fabulously beautiful east-west fraternization under the Spanish sun.
But the fact that this only works in self-defense against a superior force of Balearic bandits is a dubious dramaturgical twist.
»Der König von Palma«,
on RTL+, linear broadcast from April 15 on RTL