Mitten im 8en
television series
Mitten im 8en (or Mitten im Achten, abbreviated MiA) was an Austrian TV soap/comedy series produced by the ORF which ran from 10 May to 29 June 2007. The title translates to "In the Middle of the 8th" (district), referring to Vienna's Josefstadt.
Repeatedly announced to be a core feature of the retuned programming by ORF's new management, the show received extremely bad ratings and devastating criticism from the start, and was thus cancelled in the middle of its first season.
Setup
MiA was set to air at 7:30 pm on weekdays on ORF1, replacing the main evening newscast (Zeit im Bild), which until then was broadcast on both ORF TV channels simultaneously.
The plot revolved around a family, a neighbouring flat share, and a bar in Vienna. It showed a demagogic mix of stereotypical, one-dimensional characters, often drawing humour from their incompatibility, and mocking cliches rather than providing real identification figures.
The underlying concept was of John de Mol's, and was known to have failed before in the Netherlands. For Austria it was redone to combine Viennese humour and language style with slapstick and sketch-like comedy as well as dramatic elements and focus on character relationships.
Production
Aware of losing many, especially younger viewers to German private stations' daily soaps in that timeslot, ORF wanted to offer a light dramedy-like series with a distinct Austrian note. They also wished to respond to calls for a domestic production, as opposed to the policy of buying in German-dubbed U.S. sitcoms only.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 3, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q1940508. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mitten im 8en” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.