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Hans Meiser is dead. The presenter experienced a rapid rise to TV fame – and ultimately ended up all the more painfully in dirty conspiracy corners.

An obituary by Steven Sowa

Successful careers sometimes begin under strange circumstances. For Hans Meiser, this had to do with an offer from Sat.1 in the early 1990s. The station lured the then RTL news anchor with a lot of money. Meiser could have gilded his TV change; he would supposedly have earned more than twice as much, but he resisted the call of money. Hans Meiser stayed at RTL – and over a total of 26 years there became one of the most famous television faces in the country.

Now Hans Meiser is dead. At the age of 77, he died of heart failure last week. As t-online learned from those around him, he only recently had an operation. The death caught his family and friends completely unprepared. Meiser was still actively working on new projects and, among other things, wanted to celebrate his comeback on the radio. The man with the eternally white hair and the unmistakable baritone will be remembered above all as a TV legend and as a pioneer of his time.

“Hans Meiser” founded the Daily Talk in Germany

Because hardly anyone else shaped the television landscape in the early 1990s like Hans Meiser. After he turned down Sat.1’s offer, RTL gave him fool’s freedom – and he used it for a risk. He went on air on September 14, 1992: the talk show “Hans Meiser” named after him was born. Just him as a moderator, a studio audience and, from Monday to Friday, people from the middle of society who talked about everyday topics. A successful concept.

This went on for 1,700 episodes, from 1992 to 2001. What may sound trivial today was tantamount to a TV revolution back then. There was no such format before, and a boom followed. Talk shows were suddenly swarming everywhere in the afternoon program. Meiser was the inventor and won, among other things, the Golden Camera and the Bambi in 1993. Arabella Kiesbauer, Andreas Türck, Bärbel Schäfer and many other presenters followed up with their own talk shows.

“Shot like a wild sow in the morning sun”

Daily Talk dominated linear television for almost a decade. While previously it was mainly celebrities who discussed world events, it was now average citizens who shared their most private stories. But as quickly as the genre rose, it also fell out of favor. The decline came around the turn of the millennium. Not only “Hans Meiser”, but also almost all other talk show offshoots were discontinued.

Hans Meiser would stay on television for quite a while. When the talk show bubble burst, his career didn’t end as abruptly as that of some of his other colleagues. Especially with his reality show series “Notruf” it went on for a while, until 2006. But with programs like “Life! Stupid”, the quiz “Twenty-One” or later appearances in the Böhmermann show “Neo Magazin Royale” he never achieved a groundbreaking success again. Throughout his life, he became a “TV legend” – one of those terms that are usually attributed to the greats of television who have already had their greatest triumphs behind them.

The dark sides followed. In 2010, RTL kicked him out without warning. Hans Meiser’s reckoning with his former home and farm broadcaster was a tough one. He was “shot down like a wild sow in the morning sun.” When t-online asked him about his old employer in an interview, Meiser blurted out: “I don’t want to have anything to do with them anymore,” he raged.

That was also Meiser: his temperament, his straightforward manner, never minced words, always had a saying in store. A side of him that made him so attractive to Jan Böhmermann in 2015. Hans Meiser became an incarnation of the angry citizen. As “The Little Man,” he complained about the “slutty systematic press” and “muselmanns,” celebrated the AfD and longed for a “charismatic leader.” Everything under the guise of satire on ZDF – until the big bang and the question of whether Meiser’s “The Little Man” wasn’t more authentic than expected.

2023-11-06 19:06:52
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