How do short-lived parents cope with everyday life with children who have grown over their heads? This is what the American documentary soap "Die Roloffs" tells DMAX. And it turns out that father and mother Roloff have their gang better under control than the supernanny allowed.
If you want to buy clothes with teenagers, you need strong nerves like wire ropes. Ask Amy Roloff. For them, such an adventure means double work - and not only because it is the mother of twins. Jeremy, 18, is about two heads taller than his brother Zack. While pretty Schlaks has a free choice among cool outfits, his short-lived brother is desperately looking for asylum in the children's section.
What Zack regularly crashes into a crisis. Even if his mother never tired of telling him that he was a normal boy, just happened to be born in the size XXS. Amy Roloff knows what she's talking about. She is only 1.22 meters tall.
How she and her likewise short man Matt cop the everyday life with the twins and also normal-sized children Molly, 14, and Jacob, 11, cope, as the documentary soap "Die Roloffs".
That sounds like a freak show, as they like the television settles in environments that describe sociologists with the attribute "precarious". You can already see the chaos in front of you. Semi-grown children stacking empty pizza boxes in the kitchen and parents literally raising their brood over their heads. In fact, Amy and Matt Roloff can no longer meet their children at eye level. That's only natural. To withdraw money from an ATM, they would need a stepladder.
However, the Roloffs are not a case for the Super Nanny, the Interior Decorator, the Debt Counselor and all the other members of the Help-TV Brigade. Father and mother Roloff have their rattle tape safely under control. And that seems to be the secret of success of this documentary soap.
After all, she has made the members of this "family, which comes in two different sizes" (New York Times), famous in the US. If US station TLC, which belongs to the Discovery group like DMAX, shows the new episodes of season five in the autumn, there will probably be another traffic chaos around their farm, near Portland, Oregon.
There is no lobby for the little ones
Others would be annoyed by this hype. The Roloffs gladly accept it. They operate next to a pumpkin farm a kind of fantasy land - with the western town, pirate ship and medieval castle. And every visitor brings cash.
Whether with Oprah Winfrey or on the popular TV show "Good Morning America", everywhere the artist Matt Roloff and his family are courted like stars. An amazing development, considering that the 1.20-meter software expert and entrepreneur made his TV debut in 1984 in the star-war movie "The Battle for Endor" as a cute furry alien.
The man, who was born 46 years ago with deformed limbs and spent five years of his childhood in hospitals, has worked hard to change his image. For years, as President of the "Little People of America" self-help group, he fought for a better lobby for short-lived citizens whose numbers are estimated to be only 30,000 in the US and 651,700 globally. In addition, he has his life story with the help of a ghostwriter on paper: "Against tall odds - being a David in a Goliath World."
But the breakthrough should only succeed when he opened the door to his TV farm in 2006, the door to his farm. When the spectators first witnessed Amy Roloff standing helplessly in front of the shelf while shopping in the supermarket. The cornflakes in the top tray moved into the cosmic distance, but Mother Roloff, practical and blessed with a sheer unshakable optimism, knew how to help. "We can do practically anything - just in other ways," she once said in an interview. In this case, she simply climbed onto the shelf.
The Roloffs are too normal for reality TV
In Germany, the second season has just started at DMAX, but the air from the documentary soap is already out. The sight of two grown-up children the size of six-year-olds with too short arms and legs is not as strange as the producers might have assumed. Apart from their handicap, the Roloffs are a whole normal middle-class family - with the difference that they aggravate everyday problems with them.
Father Roloff will decide this season if he should not be stuck as a programmer, because of his jobs as a farmer, software vendor and dealer for special tools for the little ones, apparently not enough to feed the family.
Even if mother Roloff as a pre-school teacher contributes to the common maintenance. The focus is again on pubescent Zack. The older he gets, the more painfully he realizes that he will never lead a life like his brother Jeremy. He does not have to sit flat at meetings of the "Little People of America" to meet women. The girls run after him. But that's not the only reason Zack envies his brother. Unlike him, Jeremy also has good prospects for a pro career as a soccer player.
The casualness with which the camera captures such conflicts prevents the viewer from feeling like a voyeur. The documentary soap allows an unobstructed view of a fringe group, which also has no lobby in Germany, as the rare appearances of short-acting actors on television hint. Or is it a coincidence that Chris Tine Urspruch, 1.32 meters tall, became known as Assistant ("Alberich") of the quirky forensic lawyer Boerne in the Münster edition of the ARD crime thriller "Tatort", her greatest success so far as the actress of the Schmunzelmonsters " Sams "celebrated?
However, the greatest strength of the documentary soap is also its biggest weakness. Just because the Roloffs are so terribly normal, the entertainment value of the series has been exhausted. Her claim to find a balance between the everyday life of a family of six and their particular problems, they redeem no later than after the first season no longer. Or do you really want to know which lines of teenage girls rhyme for Mother's Day?
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