The Mallorca Files: "The Ex-Factor" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC Studios, Britbox, France Télévisions, ZDFNeo, Baleares Film Commission, first shown November 25, 2019, copyrighted 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 3) my husband Charles and I watched an unusually interesting episode of the TV series The Mallorca Files – a quite good police procedural with a long list of contributing production companies (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC Studios, Britbox, France Télévisions, ZDFNeo, Baleares Film Commission) about a British woman, Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys), and a German man, Max Winter (Julian Looman), teamed up as police detectives on the Spanish island of Mallorca and forced to work under a rather intense local, Inéz Villegas (Maria Fernández Ache). Max is dating a local barmaid named Carmen Lorenzo (Tábata Cerezo) and has just asked her to marry him – which makes him more impatient than usual with all the people who just assume that since he and Miranda work together, they must be lovers. The main intrigue on this one is that Max and Miranda have been called in to investigate the mysterious disappearance of some valuable recording and film production equipment at the home of Jürgen Kuhl (Tobias Licht), producer and host of the popular German TV talent show Deutsche Musik. Jürgen is such an arrogant bastard he boasts at one point, “I invented Deutsche Musik” – which of course had me thinking of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner and some other pretty good Deutsche musicians who preceded him by at least a century. (This show was first aired in 2019 but its copyright date was 2020 – odd; I’ve seen shows that were copyrighted before they were shown publicly, but almost never the other way around.)

But the equipment thefts, if they occurred at all, were simply a blind to get Max and Miranda to the “Jürgen Kuhl Boot Camp” so they could witness a confrontation between Jürgen and Jens Schmidt (Victor von Schirach), a large and homely man with a singing voice that can best be described as mediocre. Jürgen has allowed him to be a contestant on Deutsche Musik because he really wants a schlub on the show audiences can laugh at, though he lured Jens to the cast in the first place by promising him the chance to sing an original song he wrote to his ex-girlfriend, Lena. Then Jürgen insisted that Jens sing “Amazing Grace” (which it’s implied that he’s claiming to have written it – “Who is he, the German George Santos?” I joked) and/or something by Gershwin instead of Jens’ original. Miranda accidentally flips on the switch to the intercom between Jürgen’s control room and Jens’ main studio, thereby allowing Jens to hear that Jürgen is allowing him on the show only to be the butt of audience laughter. Jens then grabs Max’s gun and takes Miranda hostage, threatening to kill her if his demands aren’t met. His demand, not surprisingly, is that he get to sing his take-me-back song to Lena on a worldwide livestream, with the other Deutsche Musik contestants playing and singing backup for him. The keyboard player has a panic attack and Miranda fills in for him – the song is only three chords and Miranda knows enough to get by – while the guitar player claims he needs to pee and Jens tells him he can do that in the swimming pool, which provokes Jürgen to yet another hissy-fit. When Jens’ command performance (literally!) happens, a crowd gathers outside Jürgen’s compound with signs hailing Jens as the next great rock star, and they start singing along with his song.

Meanwhile, Max gets let out of the building and sneaks back in with the intention of rescuing Miranda and getting the gun away from Jens. Eventually we learn [spoiler alert!] that the whole thing was a set-up between Jürgen and Jens; Jürgen allowed Jens to take Miranda hostage to create an exciting new story arc for his show – and the cops ultimately arrest both Jens and Jürgen, while the new-found fans still hang out outside Jürgen’s compound singing Jens’ song. There’s also a Black woman police commissioner from London, Abbey Palmer (Tanya Moodie), who’s there to take Miranda back to London to resume her regular duties with the London PD, but at the end Miranda chooses to stay in Mallorca while Max is still uncertain as to where he stands with Carmen because – like Prosper Merimée’s and Georges Bizet’s Carmen, who refused to commit to one man at a time because “love is like a rebellious bird/And it has never heard of law” – she’s answering him noncommittally, neither saying yes or no to his genuinely heartfelt proposal. This Mallorca Files episode had me from the get-go – I’d say it’s the best show we’ve seen on this series – and I especially liked its implied satire of so-called “reality television” and the absurd notion that what we see on shows like this, Survivor or American Idol has anything to do with normal notions of “reality” – though Donald Trump somehow rode the success of The Apprentice to the Presidency of the U.S. (and has an excellent chance of becoming President again, goodness knows why) largely by selling American voters that he was the most intelligent, sagacious and successful capitalist of all time … because that was the character he played on The Apprentice.