Chabos

Arkadij Khaet's Chabos arrived on ZDF Mediathek in 2025 and was widely received as one of the most distinctive German coming-of-age comedies of recent years. Khaet, previously known for the Oscar-shortlisted short film Masel Tov Cocktail (2020), made his feature-length series debut with this six-episode production, set in his own family's Wuppertal-region migrant-Jewish-Russian community.

The series follows a group of young friends (first-and-second-generation immigrants from various post-Soviet, Turkish, Lebanese and East-German backgrounds) through the absurdities of growing up in contemporary multicultural Germany. The school year structure carries the season: friendship dynamics, identity-formation arguments, the small daily collisions between the families' cultural expectations and the protagonists' developing sense of who they want to be. The title (Chabos, German youth slang for buddies, derived from Yiddish) is the show's quiet thesis.

The series is unusual in German prestige drama for staging migrant-background lives without making the migrant story itself the dramatic engine; the protagonists' biographical particularities are present without being thematised. Khaet's collaboration with co-creator and lead writer Lior Shamriz produced a register that critics compared favourably to Skam and Sex Education. ZDF's Mediathek launched the series as part of its broader strategic pivot toward younger streaming-native audiences.