Column: These candidates from the summer house scandal season are being exchanged for the jungle camp of 2023

“The Summer House of the Stars” opens its doors again. But two candidates from the 2020 scandal season are now being traded as new jungle camp personnel. Vip Vip, Hooray!: Andrej Mangold and Lisha are back!

“Shut up Lisha! Eva (Benetatou) might forget and you pretend she killed someone! Andrej (Mangold) was probably much worse. And what about Yeliz (Koc), who is a man who lives in the face slapped? You fucking dirty hypocrite!”

Wow, what nice comment landed in my inbox? Trash TV fans are eagerly awaiting the new season of “Summer House of the Stars” these days. At the same time, more and more information is leaking out about who should move to the jungle camp in February 2023. In addition to candidates like Djamila Rowe or Yeliz Koc, the new potential jungle campers read like the “Who’s who” of the 2020 “summer home” It must be said in no uncertain terms that many viewers have bad memories. No other season touched trash TV fans as much as the fifth season.

With each episode, the bullying against reality TV contestant and Mangold’s ex-girlfriend, Eva Benetatou, got worse. Very sympathetic at first, the Youtuber Lisha and Mangold themselves got caught up in a spiral of negative headlines. Even RTL entertainment boss Kai Sturm took a critical look at the summer house scandal, saying at the time that the nature of the conflicts in the house had damaged the external perception of the broadcaster: “The escalation of aggressiveness and the unpleasant negative feeling that this season has left us personally touched.”

“You don’t get quotas with purely antisocial behavior”

He appealed not only to the atmosphere in the house, but also to the behavior of the Berliner Lisha, who repeatedly insulted her housemates as “disabled”, “critters” or with the F-word. In fact, according to the entertainment boss of RTL, the conditions in the summer house at the time were “much worse”, even “in some cases beyond the pain threshold. (…) But whoever decides to present himself publicly in this way must also take responsibility himself. If not, we’d rather make that clear.”

I’ve been writing TV reviews for a hundred years and I can safely say that this season was by far the most awkward thing I’ve ever dealt with. That’s with criticism. The shit storm is inevitable these days. But you should be surprised if a broadcaster says the aggressively charged atmosphere in the summer house was ‘rating poison’, because ‘ratings can’t be achieved by purely antisocial behaviour’. And then, of all people, those summer house dwellers are on the list of candidates who will soon be on the plane to Down Under. It is perfectly legitimate to find such a decision strange at first!

So I asked my social media community, where many reality TV fans are, what they think of Andrej Mangold and Lisha’s move to the jungle camp. The answer: sobering. Many viewers wrote that they could not forget what happened in 2020. This summer home was a turning point for many trash TV fans.

Maybe the jungle camp candidates will show a different side, maybe the 2020 summer house, as Mangold once said, “everything was cut really wrong” and maybe both people are really great guys! But that doesn’t change the fact that TV viewers are skeptical of the unpleasant summer house experience of 2020 when they hear about the new cast of jungle camp. Criticism is neither “hatred” of the candidates nor “bait”, but now I will shut up “dirty hypocrite” on this subject, dear “my face”.

“The retro wave is rolling”

Let’s instead dedicate ourselves to a woman who gave a bombastic interview to the media magazine DWDL: Ulla Kock am Brink this week. The presenter, who once became known throughout Germany with the “100,000 Mark Show”, is back on television. And with this show! Not only RTL has noticed that it can be worthwhile to breathe new life into once successful old formats or as DWDL writes: “The retro wave is rolling.”

The beauty of Ulla Kock am Brink’s statements: She doesn’t mince words, seems downright aggressive. You get the impression that she had been waiting for years to finally, to put it bluntly, open her mouth about what she thought about the TV business at the time. For example, she talks about “a lot of good women in the last 10, 15 years who haven’t been seen on television.” At the same time, according to the presenter, “women in major shows were repeatedly sidelined.” Look nice, size 34, deep neckline. True to the motto: “You can say sentences, but let your male co-moderator use the jokes and charm.”

It is especially nice to read how Kock am Brink frees himself from all the pressure of how you have to look on television. Her top condition: you have to take her as she is. “Because I’m not going through surgery just to host another TV show.” And further: “There is discrimination on many levels – and age discrimination is one of them. (…) In a democratic culture it should be possible to give a stage to all expressions – whether it be sexuality, age, body shape or My call: just look each other in the eye and see yourself as a human being.” Until next week!

(This article was first published on Friday, September 2, 2022.)