Markus Lanz (2008)
Markus Lanz is a 2008 German-language talk series created by Markus Lanz. It stars Markus Lanz, Karl Lauterbach and Robin Alexander.
Four guests, 75 minutes, three nights a week, and a table that keeps filling up. Markus Lanz has run on ZDF, one of Germany's public broadcasters, since 3 June 2008, and it carries the name of the man in the chair.
The structure is plain and does most of the work. Guests arrive one at a time instead of sitting down together at the start, so the table keeps changing shape, and a subject opened by one person gets handed to somebody who has just walked into it. They come from across German public life, and the credits read like a cross-section of it: Ulrich Wickert, Reinhold Messner, Tim Mälzer, Atze Schröder. Each is there to talk about a topic from personal experience rather than to perform a set piece.
Recording happens in a television studio in Hamburg-Altona, usually a few hours before broadcast, sometimes live. The short gap keeps the conversation tied to the day it goes out on, which is what a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday slot is for.
For a viewer outside Germany, it serves as a running account of what the country is arguing about, in German, at length, with no monologue and no house band in sight.
Official site
Cast
Similar series
Explore Markus Lanz guides
A few thoughts on Markus Lanz
Start with Schumacher, the 2021 documentary about a German public figure of exactly the kind who ends up in one of these chairs, and a useful companion if you watch this show for the long portrait of a life rather than for the day's headline. Past that, the catalog's closest neighbours are books rather than screens, and they suit a narrower taste. Politics, philosophy, culture and Language and Politics both collect long conversations about power, media and public life, so they reward the same appetite that keeps you watching four people work through one subject for over an hour. Both ask more of you than a Tuesday night does. Read them for the shape of the form, the slow question and the answer that takes ten minutes to arrive.
Talk shows with four guests around one table
Lanz brings his guests in one at a time, so a politician can walk into an argument a chef started ten minutes earlier. These shows run the same trick: a table that keeps filling up, a subject handed between people who never planned to meet. Expect crosstalk, and expect the best minutes to come out of the collision.
Long interviews that let one guest finish the thought
Lanz splits 75 minutes between four people, and his strongest stretches come when he stays on one of them and keeps asking. These shows give a whole episode to a single chair: Gunter Gaus in black and white, Vladimir Pozner in Moscow, a director walking back through a career. Slower than Lanz, pointed the same way.
Serious talk shows outside the American late-night model
ZDF runs Lanz three nights a week as public-service television, booking authors, ministers and mountaineers where a US network would book a film star with something to promote. Skavlan works the Nordic version, Stern TV the German magazine version, and the rest cover politics and reporting in their own countries. Same job, different studio.