Doppelhaushälfte

Dennis Schanz's Doppelhaushälfte launched on ZDFneo in 2022 and was widely received as one of the most distinctive German half-hour comedy-dramas of recent years. The series consolidated Schanz, previously best known for the German children's-TV series Schloss Einstein, as a prestige-comedy showrunner. Each episode runs approximately twenty-five minutes; the first season is six episodes.

Two very different families share a semi-detached house in a comfortable suburban German neighbourhood. The Knuppe family (Milan Peschel and Maryam Zaree as the couple) are chaotic, impulsive, working-class, and on a downward financial slope. Their neighbours (Minh-Khai Phan-Thi and Benito Bause) are controlled, aspirational, professional, with a Vietnamese-German cultural background that the comedy treats as one of its three central registers. The series's central tension is that the two households cannot avoid each other; their adult-life politics, parenting decisions and dietary habits accumulate into a quiet middle-class war.

The series operates in a register of dry observational realism that owes something to the BBC's Detectorists and Motherland, with the German specificities (suburban-houseparenting culture, the Wuppertal-style cul-de-sac geography) carrying its national particularity. The performances of the four leads, especially Peschel and Phan-Thi, anchor the show's continuing critical reputation; a second season was commissioned for 2024.