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Programmer Jana (Olga von Luckwald) wants to get started as a loner
Photo: Frank Dicks / ZDF
Right at the beginning, dear readers: inside, even before this text really gets into the series review, please imagine the following scenario: Your partner is cheating on you with your best friend, and because that is not enough, he also disappears with your baby together.
If you feel anger now, or disappointment, or both, then that's great. Then you will understand the dire situation Jana (Olga von Luckwald) finds herself in "Start the fck up". The only difference is that the baby is not actually a baby, but an app developed by the young programmer herself that is on the verge of a breakthrough.
After the double shock, Jana now wants to overcome everything that she has stood for up to now.
She dreams of the next big thing and follows a new premise that she imposes on herself: »Fuck everyone, from now on it's just Jana first.
Jana.
Jana.
Jana. «To do this, she rents a place where prospective entrepreneurs with a preference for flat hierarchies stay these days - at least according to the cliché: in a coworking space (if you have to google“ coworking space ”now, you're closed old for this series).
Powder keg coworking space
There Jana meets the suspiciously creative constant chatterbox Kenny (Kelvin Kilonzo), his suspiciously inconspicuous yes-man friend Jens (László Branko Breiding) and the two suspiciously toxic founders Nura (Mona Pirzad) and Sophie (Karen Dahmen). Driven by the greed for realization, some of them roam around like a steppe wolf, some others almost drown in their self-doubt.
“Start the fck up” is also shaped by the idea of equipping the ensemble with celebrities (Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, Ingolf Lück) who, haha, play themselves.
That's enough to make you smile.
In fact, it is the diverse characters that drive the action.
Because wherever people, even of so different characters, share rooms, there are problems: When the idea machine Kenny develops the ingenious idea for a digital therapist after a number of beers, but can no longer remember it the next morning, Jana programs the app without further ado herself. Will she be exposed if she goes it alone?
So fast, so mad, so over-the-top
Much of this comedic generation portrait is reminiscent of the successful series “How to Sell Drugs online (almost)” produced by the Bildundtonfabrik (btf).
No wonder, as Jan Böhmermann's production company has a hand in the game this time too, together with the Cologne colleagues from Network Movie.
The staging is also enjoyable, the scenes so brisk, the dialogues so frenzied, but also so over the top that it is necessary to point out at this point that the constantly ironic life of Generation Z could lead to outbursts of anger among older viewers - and at some point probably also with younger people.
Because one asks oneself: Aren't self-doubts and the desire for self-realization something worth striving for?
Is failure perhaps okay, especially in your twenties: in?
The longer the deliberately oversubscribed startups are supported, the more tense the mood among them, but the clearer their weaknesses become. Soon all protagonists will be advised by Jana's new pastoral care app, which will allow the viewer a glimpse into their inner life, visually reinforced by a star diagram on the left edge of the picture, which indicates the characteristics of different emotional categories: surprise, anger, sadness, ... Numbers and letters run across the screen at the same time, in a figurative sense, cinematically.
We are grateful for all these brief escapes from the powder keg coworking space.
If the main location seems refreshing at first, it becomes increasingly constricting and finally annoying.
Where “Start the fck up” ultimately wants to go is not entirely clear.
And so one wishes the actors one thing above all else for the already planned second season: more space.
And now, dear readers: inside, draw the curtains, pull the hood down over your face and program Jana's promising app.
To all of the less gifted among you, be careful who you are drunk and tell of your witty ideas.
“Start the fck up” comprises eight episodes of 30 minutes each. "ZDFneo" shows two episodes every Tuesday at 11:15 pm. The complete series will be shown in the ZDF media library for a year.
