Philipp Käßbohrer is a writer, director, creator, producer and indie boss and in a sit-down with Deadline before accepting his German TV Disruptor Award said his aim is to keep shaking up the business.
“We see change everywhere in the world right now and I think that the most comfortable way to adapt to this is to follow the stream and go where that change leads you,” Käßbohrer said during the award presentation at the Seriencamp drama confab.
He continued” “You need to take some energy… to get to the places where it’s uncomfortable and where you try to figure out how to adapt, because that’s something the young generation already does. Creators on the internet don’t wait for a commissioner.”
Käßbohrer runs the Cologne-based indie bildundtonfabrik with Matthias Murmann, with whom he created Netflix hit How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast). It now has its own studios in Cologne as well as a games division, out of Berlin.
Having started out in music videos btf came to everyone’s attention with the anarchic talkshow Roche and Böhmermann. “It was a talk show for everybody who hates talk shows,” Käßbohrer said. The show was for what was then a newbie channel and market disruptor ZDFkultur. “It was a cultural digital channel with not a lot of money, but a lot of freedom. They also kind of had the idea of disrupting the system.”
Determined not to stay in one lane, Käßbohrer and btf then buddied up with another outfit looking to come into the German market and shake things up – Netflix. The streamer greenlit How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast), about a nerdy high schooler starting a drugs empire on the dark net.
“All the doors we knocked on, they stayed closed. And then suddenly there came this new player on the market, which was Netflix. And they also had this pretty similar idea of ‘we have to enter the market, to show that we are here, to do something different’. And they were looking for people who also thought like that.”
Speaking about the show he said: “The pitch always was ‘Breaking Bad in Silicon Valley’. We really wanted to make the show feel like a day in the life of a Gen Z person. And then we ended up with our tagline; ‘entertaining the kids and frightening the parents.’”
Whether it’s a new digital, channel, or a new streamer, the plan is always to find other disruptors, Käßbohrer explained.
“I thought about the word ‘disruption’ and what it means to be a disrupter and a lot of it is about getting people together. You cannot be a disruptor alone or you are just the annoying kid in the class. You have to find other people, and then you have to take fear away from them, to take risks, to go somewhere you don’t know.”
Check out the full interview above.
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