Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s regular strand that shines a light on breakout series and films that are shaking up the international market. In a globalized industry, a hit show can come from anywhere and local success stories can become international sensations.
In this edition we have one of the hottest new shows on the international block: Maxton Hall – The World Between Us. From storied German producer UFA Fiction, the young adult drama is a German Original for Prime Video. Amazon speedily renewed it for season two, which was a no-brainer given it notched the largest ever viewership for one of its international originals in launch week. It has sat atop the Prime Video viewing charts in 120 countries including Australia, Brazil, the U.S. and UK.
Name: Maxton Hall – The World Between Us
Country: Germany
Platform: Prime Video
Producer: UFA Fiction
For fans of: Heartstopper, The Kissing Booth
Maxton Hall – The World Between Us is a German-language romantic drama set in England, which is setting viewing records for Prime Video. It’s no wonder the streamer has swiftly greenlit another instalment of the YA series.
Fremantle-owned UFA Fiction produces the show and the producer duo behind the series, Ceylan Yildirim and Markus Brunnemann, clued Deadline into the making of one of the hottest international series around.
Mona Kasten’s book trilogy, Save Me, Save You and Save Us, is the starting point. It had generated a big BookTok and social media buzz when UFA took the idea for a series to market. Some German-based buyers thought it skewed too young, or wanted to situate the drama in Germany, but Amazon saw potential. In 2019 the streamer greenlit the adaptation. It was shot in 2022 and could have launched earlier, but Prime Video wanted time to bake in pre-premiere marketing including a big Berlin launch and then taking key cast to the U.S.
Brunnemann recalls snagging the rights: “We were looking for really popular mainstream fiction novels, and frankly this hit the market pretty big, but there was actually nothing in the daily reporting press and the features sections of the dailies, it was under their radar, but we read it and said, ‘That’s a great story’.”
The show follows Ruby Bell, played by Harriet Herbig-Matten. Ruby is a brilliant young woman who aspires to get into Oxford University and is single-minded in that pursuit. Winning a scholarship to Maxton Hall, an elite college for the super-rich, is a step in the right direction. It also thrusts her into a different social milieu, and one in which James Beaufort is a fellow student. He is an heir from an uber wealthy family and is accustomed to the trappings of wealth and privilege. The pair are thrown together by events after Ruby unwittingly witnesses events that are part of an explosive secret.
“James is an insanely toxic masculine guy,” says Damian Hardung, who plays the wealthy heir. “He lives for excess, knows no future… but is suddenly forced into the moment by Ruby.”
Yildirim likens the connection the books and now series have established with readers and audiences to the impact that boybands had in the 90s, where fans got swept up in an emotional response to what was being made.
“Our task was to say, ‘Okay, when it’s touching so many people, and so many people are carried away in this euphoric spirit, how can we adapt that, how can we translate that into this visual format?’,” she says. “And so we started to create a vision about how poetry, the philosophical aspects and the soul of the story could be introduced. We needed one year to approach it in a very detailed way, together with our fantastic head writer, Daphne Ferraro. And then the writers’ room started with seven staff writers who were fantastic too, and we got to the core of it.”
Kasten read the scripts and came to see filming – posting ‘my book babies’ on social after meeting the cast on one visit to the set. She also saw the episodes. For the team, winning the author’s approval was important, Brunnemann says. “I’d say Mona didn’t ‘construct’ this novel in any way, I think it’s coming right out of her soul. We can only assume how difficult it is to give that to somebody, and then they put it into pictures and cast people around it. We were really like, ‘Oh my god, what is she gonna say?’ And she liked it!”
“Shakespearean structures”
Using voiceover was an important narrative mechanism for the producers and one they thought long and hard about. “You really get into the heads of all the characters, and not only her feelings and emotions, but his too, it’s the perspective of both of them,” Yildirim says. “And there are Shakespearean structures, it has more depth than one may think, it has a philosophical background. These are things that influenced the voiceovers and give it a whole different layer.”
The freshman season of six episodes covers the events in the first novel in the trilogy, Save Me. The series was shot in Marienburg Castle near Hannover in Germany, which is, fittingly, owned by a wealthy German family with British connections.
Telling an intense love story and working with a young cast brought responsibilities for producers. “It was very important to talk with them, of course, to talk a lot about the roles and to figure out how they approach it,” says Yildirim. “The story is highly emotional, it’s a roller coaster ride, and of course, due to [filming] scheduling, sometimes it’s difficult. Our main actress, Harriet, talks a lot about that challenge of playing being deeply in love on one day and hating each other the next.
“I’ve never experienced such a powerful ensemble, who were pushing each other to get better, and challenging each other to get deeper into the emotions. It was really mind blowing.”
The setting of England, with its history of aristocratic families who send their privileged offspring to elite institutions, was key to the story, and UFA pushed back when potential buyers and commissioners wanted to relocate the action to Germany.
“We said ‘no, we can’t do that,’ because that what it’s all about, escapism and dreaming of, and seeing another world. There’s nothing comparable to the kind of setup we had in German society,” says Brunnemann.
Having a German-language show set outside Germany is not unusual for local audiences with shows such as Barcelona Crime or pubcaster ZDF’s German adaptations of English novelist Rosamund Pilcher’s novels. What is novel is having a German-language series set in the UK resonate so strongly around the world – a phenomenon that possibly speaks to younger audiences not making viewing choices based on the language or location in which a project is rooted.
Selecting directors who would really lean into the emotions of the characters, which Yildirim notes, is style not always seen in German storytelling, was a challenge. Martin Schreier and Tarek Roehlinger were brought on, and directed three eps each. “We knew it had to feel high-class so with our first director Martin Shai, we looked for someone who most of the time works in cinema, because we needed this very glossy look, and we needed it to be big and show these big emotions,” Brunnemann explains.
Yildirim says she had followed Roehlinger since he was in film school and his work suited the desired tone. “I really loved the way he put emotions into images, and this was what we were looking for, not to talk too much, but to have a cinematic vision of how to express feelings.”
With one series wrapped and another greenlit, it seems likely that Maxton Hall will end up as a three-series drama. Certainly, the producers are set on completing the story: “We would love to, we have a trilogy [of books],” Brunnemann says. “It’s a big story, it has a beginning, a middle and the end.”