When the laughter gets stuck in the station

Anke Engelke is a very good actress, she can play very different roles, and: Anke Engelke is funny. That's why she's perfect for the role of "Tina", a train attendant at Deutsche Bahn who is as likeable as she is exasperated and who fights her way through the abysses of the highly dysfunctional state-owned company with her team. And the mini-series "Boah, Bahn" is, without question, well worth seeing, at least if you're into mockumentaries.

There's just one problem with this: Boah, Bahn is the new marketing campaign from Deutsche Bahn itself. In other words: Deutsche Bahn has seriously paid to be portrayed in this series as a total junk company, run to the hilt by nice but simple-minded employees. And, yes, of course: we understand the self-irony, the authenticity, the honesty. We understand the approach of using Anke Engelke to draw frustrated customers back to their own side, according to the motto: The railroads, that's all of us. Unfortunately, that doesn't work. Because anyone who regularly suffers from rail chaos does not want to be (more or less subtly) manipulated. Those who pay a lot of money for such a poor product don't want to be asked to come back and pay a lot of money again when they already know: I have no alternative anyway.

Before producing this series, someone at Deutsche Bahn should probably have asked the question: What problem are we actually solving here? And then perhaps someone would have dared to ask: Why was the insurance company in "Stromberg" the fictitious "Capitol", and why was the supermarket "Kolinski" in "Die Discounter"? And what could we do with the money instead to make the Bahn brand experience a little bit, just a little bit better?

Or what do you think?