Explore TV Series

Travel the entire length of the Sky, the world’s highest major river, as it flows from the Himalayan mountains down to the Indian Ocean, passing Asia’s biodiversity hotspots and affecting more than a billion people along the way.

Backstage is a German documentary-style TV series on ZDF that takes viewers behind the scenes of popular ZDF shows and productions. Rather than being a traditional drama or fiction series, it offers an inside look at how TV formats are created: from the set, the crew and cast interactions to the challenges and everyday moments during filming. Each episode focuses on a different show or production as its subject. For example, it has shown what happens behind the camera of series like Bettys Diagnose, the cooking show Die Küchenschlacht or the crime drama Nord Nord Mord, exploring both the technical and human aspects of making television.

A Thousand and One Nights: The well-known folk tales from the Orient are passed on from generation to generation. Adventurers fire our imaginations. Expeditions give us a glimpse. There is no other landscape that is so barren and at the same time so filled with mysteries. Our films will unveil some of these secrets and tell stories about landscape and people in the desert today.

The Italian Mafia is often referred to as an octopus, its many arms symbolising the clan’s countless branches, with which it ominously and sinisterly penetrates all areas of society. But Italian investigators consider this comparison dangerous and erroneous, as the Mafia rather more resembles one of evolutionsmost intelligent entities: the parasite. This documentary, based on Sicilians in their campaign against the world’s oldest Mafia organisation, the Cosa Nostra, explains how it succeeded in penetrating the brain of the system like a parasite. In doing so, barely known chapters of recent Italian history are brought to light. The documentary shows the example of the Cosa Nostra, the Mafia is now a global company and their influence despite all search successes of recent years rather than growing waning.

For 28 years, a nearly insurmountable barrier kept people from fleeing East Germany. But then, the dramatic night of November 9, 1989, saw the fall of the Wall that divided Germany. Today, it is difficult to imagine what was bitter reality just a few decades ago.