You’ve lived the life, now check out the show: Bigheads, the web series about would-be artists in Berlin, premieres its third episode today. Watch it here first, in Exberliner’s exclusive preview of Berlin’s new uproarious comedy!
(Attention: watch episode 1 and episode 2 first!)
In a world of economic despair, ridiculously high rent and under-appreciation for semi-thought-out artwork, young artists have but one choice: the cheap and every-accepting Berlin. But in Bigheads, a darkly comic web series from expat trio Marlene Melchior (English/German), Alex Forge (French) and Lowan Johnston (Australian), blogger Anjuna Pashnani discovers that a city where 20-something occasionally-artistic wannabes can afford to pay rent while still maintaining a booze budget large enough to party relentlessly might not be as magical as they say.
Berlin’s expat art scene is swarming with oversized egos facing failure, like the tattooed “big-in-the-1990s” choreographer destroyed by a coke addiction or the glitter-covered, bearded queen of the German contemporary dance scene. Melchior is quite familiar with this world herself – having lived in Berlin for eight years, she’s heard the learn-from-your-failures mantra too many times to count (a variant of which opens the series) and sees Berlin as the dangerously perfect place to do so. “People just want to be famous,” she says, but failure is the norm and living is affordable enough to survive in its wake.
Lovingly humorous and inspired by the creators’ own experiences, the show is, in their words, a “love song to Berlin”, and specifics like episode two’s portrayal of a big- and air-headed contemporary dancer who drunkenly spews her insecurities hours before regurgitating the contents of her stomach – just in time for an audition – are clearly part of the lyrics.
