Andreas Neumann examines the ideological development of fictional East German television in the 1980s through an in-depth analysis of ten miniseries and series from that decade. At the center of his analysis are films that are detached from reality, where the everyday life of East German citizens is at best portrayed in a fragmented manner. By extensively incorporating the contemporary historical and socio-political context of each production, the author successfully links the depicted content to real developments in the last decade of East Germany and extracts the ideological themes negotiated in the subtext of the films. He investigates whether the prevailing thesis about East German television during this time, which suggests a constant depoliticization in the fictional programming segment, can be confirmed based on the film corpus he studied, or if perhaps an alternative approach is warranted.