The Best Years (TV Series)

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Television series
German title The best years
Original title Thirtysomething
Country of production United States
original language English
Year (s) 1987-1991
Production
company
The Bedford Falls Company, MGM / UA Television Productions
length 60 minutes
Episodes 85 in 4 seasons
genre drama
idea Marshall Herskovitz ,
Edward Zwick
music WG Snuffy Walden ,
Stewart Levin
First broadcast September 29, 1987 (USA) on ABC
German-language
first broadcast
October 27, 1991 on Das Erste
occupation

The Best Years (Original Title: Thirtysomething ) is an American television series created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick , which ran on ABC from 1987 to 1991 and won an Emmy and a Golden Globe in 1988 .

action

The series begins with Michael Steadman, who runs an advertising agency with his friend Eliot Weston, and his wife Hope, who recently had their daughter Janey, live in Philadelphia . Hope paused her career as a journalist to have time for her young daughter. Michael's business partner Elliot is married to Nancy and they have two children, Ethan and Britanny. Hope's best friend is Ellyn Warren, who works as a local Philadelphia politician. Other main characters are Michael's cousin, photographer Melissa Steadman, and English professor Gary Shepherd. This is a close friend of Michael who used to be with Melissa. Over time, he teams up with the social worker Susannah Hart and has a child with her.

Much of the plot is taken up by the changing tension between the two married couples as well as between the respective friends. Eliot and Nancy survive a divorce, as does Nancy's cancer.

Michael is much more plagued by fears of not being able to maintain his upper middle class bourgeois standard of living (with a house in a good residential area and two cars) than the more carefree Eliot. After their joint advertising agency goes down the drain, they both start at the big agency DAA. There, the more adapted Michael, under the protection of the manager Miles Drentell ( David Clennon ), makes very good progress, while Eliot at some point realizes that his talent will wither there and quits.

The good-natured Michael, rather dominated by Hope, finally manages to quit his unpopular job at the DAA. At that time Eliot had already left the DAA, where he could not win a flower pot, and moved with his wife and children to California, where he makes commercials as a director; Nancy has now become a successful illustrator who publishes her own children's books.

Gary's relationship with Susannah doesn't last very long, and she leaves Philadelphia with the child. Before his newly developed friendship with Ellyn can transform into something deeper (or not), Gary dies in a car accident - Michael had previously promised not to ride his bike in ice and snow as he usually does. After a bit of back and forth, Ellyn gets together with Billy Sidel, whom she finally married. Hope receives an attractive job offer and decides to go to Washington, DC .

Not long after Gary's unexpected serial death, the series was canceled. Some storylines remained largely open: for example, whether Michael and Hope's marriage will last, and if so, whether the family will live on Hope's salary in the future, or what about Melissa, who after one of her photos graced a record cover for Carli Simon , makes it big as a photographer.

occupation

The synchronization of the series was created at Bavaria Synchron based on dialogue books by Philip Kraus, Pierre Peters-Arnolds and Johannes Keller.

role actor Voice actor
Michael Steadman Ken Olin Gudo Hoegel
Hope Steadman Mel Harris Susanne von Medvey (1st voice)
Gundula Liebisch (2nd voice)
Melissa Steadman Melanie Mayron Marietta Meade
Elliot Weston Timothy Busfield Ulrich Frank
Nancy Weston Patricia Wettig Katharina Lopinski
Gary Shepherd Peter Horton Hans-Georg Panczak
Susannah Shepherd Patricia Kalember Kornelia buoy
Ellyn Warren Polly Draper Katerina Jacob (1st voice)
Andrea L'Arronge (2nd voice)
Susanne Wirtz (3rd voice)
Miles Drentell David Clennon Bernd Stephan
Steve Woodman Terry Kinney Walter von Hauff
Ethan Weston Luke Rossi Philipp Miller (1st voice)
Sebastian Dütsch (2nd voice)
Daniel Schlauch (3rd voice)
Brittany Weston Jordana Shapiro Sofia Suarez

reception

The series is still considered one of the most groundbreaking in US television history and is included in many best-of lists, it won thirteen Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes .

The artistic implementation of the so-called “baby boomers” also caused controversy. The feminist Susan Faludi saw the series in her work Backlash (1991) as a prime example of a glorification of the married woman and mother compared to the single woman, who is portrayed as poor and deplorable. In 2009, the New York Times considered it one of the show's most notable features to have consistently discussed child rearing for the first time. The NY Times raised the question of how the series could ever be understood as a "sacrosanct alternative" given the character of Nancy, who was betrayed by her husband and had cancer. In 2016, the Washington Post discussed the 25-year return of the sudden film death of popular protagonist Gary Shepard, which caused great consternation that nowadays, serial deaths of a main character happen every minute.

In January 2020, the ABC announced an expected continuation of the series under the title Thirtysomething (else) , for which it has recruited some of the previous leading actors , while others have guest appearances. Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick will also be producing again .

Broadcast in Germany

Between October 27, 1991 and July 5, 1992, the first showed a total of 35 episodes from seasons 1 to 3 late on Sunday evening. The confusing broadcasting practice is also blamed for the comparatively lower success in German-speaking countries: some individual episodes were made responsible skipped, the broadcasts in turn did not always correspond to the chronological order of the US premiere.

From the spring of 1993, the third programs began broadcasting the series. Initially, only the 35 episodes that were shown in the first were broadcast. From the summer of 1995, the third programs took the series again in their program. Now, for the first time, further episodes have been broadcast in German for the first time. Some third programs (for example the Hessischer Rundfunk and the Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk) continued the broadcast at the point in the middle of season 3 where it ended on the first run. Other broadcasters (for example Norddeutsche and Westdeutsche Rundfunk) began broadcasting again from the first episode and for the first time also showed the episodes that were originally skipped. Because of this, between August 1995 and May 1996, individual episodes were first broadcast on two different stations, namely in the Hessischer Rundfunk program and in the Norddeutscher Rundfunk program. Nationwide, the series was shown again in the first between January 2004 and September 2005. However, the broadcast slot was from Thursday to Friday around 2 a.m., and the series often began much later than announced due to live broadcasts in the main evening program. It premiered on pay TV in September 2016: RTL Passion broadcast the series in its entirety in the daily evening program. For the first time, it was broadcast in 16: 9 image format and the original US opening credits were used and the German episode titles were not shown.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hank Stuever, ' Thirtysomething' killed off Gary 25 years ago. Now TV characters drop dead all the time. In: The Washington Post on February 11, 2016, accessed January 23, 2020
  2. German synchronous index | Series | The best years. Retrieved January 7, 2019 .
  3. Baltimore Sun
  4. ^ NY Times 2009
  5. ^ Hank Stuever, ' Thirtysomething' killed off Gary 25 years ago. Now TV characters drop dead all the time. In: The Washington Post on February 11, 2016, accessed January 23, 2020
  6. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/08/entertainment/thirtysomething-pilot-abc/index.html