Deadline’s German TV Disruptor Anke Greifeneder Wants To “Challenge The Status Quo” & Find Local Hits For HBO

EXCLUSIVE: “I try to produce things that have the potential to be the talk of the town.”

This mantra has served HBO Max Germany boss Anke Greifeneder well through a career that has seen her become a dab hand at launching American networks and streamers locally, carving out space for original German productions while building out teams assembled with the brightest and best.

Now, she wants to commission the next generation of local HBO shows and is seeking out the voices of a generation, the next Lena Dunham or Richard Gadd, but from Germany.

Greifeneder was handed the 2026 Deadline German TV Disruptor Award at last night’s Seriencamp opening ceremony in Cologne and the exec whose credits range from 4 Blocks to Arthur’s Law to Weinberg, and are as far reaching as MTV’s Pimp my Bicycletells us being disruptive means going against the grain.

“It’s about breaking routines and questioning how things are done,” Greifeneder tells us in the days leading up to Seriencamp. “If I have five similar topics on the table I will not do them, because that is a trend. You have to instead think about how to reinvent a genre. You need to be counter cyclical.”

Greifender returns to the notion of being “counter cyclical” several times during our interview and is frank in her assessment of the difficulty in taking this approach in Germany.

“[German actor] Ken Duken once told me that Americans make movies with money, Brits with courage and Germans with fear,” she adds. “There is a reason Germany is the most over-insured country in the world. German angst is not just an expression; we love rules because it gives us security. Of course I have fears in my private life but I don’t [in commissioning] because I feel that if you trust a story or a gut feeling then you should go for it.”

Greifeneder comes with a relatively unique perspective, having been at the forefront of launching some of the biggest brands in the nation. “I have always worked in global or international so I get different cultures, ways of storytelling and approaching things, and in a way that gives me this different view about Germany.”

The executive, nevertheless, is enthused by the well of local German talent she is speaking with all the time. In her current guise, she finds herself leading the charge on the development and production of local original content for HBO Max across German-speaking Europe and France, the latter of which just got added to her roster upon the exit of Vera Peltekian.

“HBO has these amazing U.S. shows but what we are missing is something local,” says Greifeneder. “We don’t want to be hasty. Our DNA of taking time on development and being really thorough is very HBO. And then we can work with the talent who tell the best stories.”

Leading the charge on originals

Greifeneder heaps praise on HBO head honcho Casey Bloys and her boss, HBO Max programming chief Sarah Aubrey, who she speaks with all the time. She describes HBO’s output as “extraordinary.” “Everyone has a different image of HBO, you’ve got the ‘Wire guys’, the ones who love Game of Thrones or a classic like Sex and the City. There is this common understanding of the disruptive way of inventing a genre. Look at The Sopranosthis is a mafia story that was twisted and made unique.”

Her first trio of local shows look to this model. Greifeneder’s team is working on a prequel to hit TNT show 4 Blocks, a thriller from Dark producers Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar starring Dark’s Lisa Vicari and based on the tales of Struwwelpeter, and a Beetz Brothers documentary about the theft of the Big Maple Leaf gold coin in Berlin.

The Sopranos-esque 4 Blocks Zero is now in the edit and speaks to everything Greifender’s team wants to achieve. Set in the 1990s just after the fall of the Berlin wall, it tells the origin story of Tareq Nassery’s Ali, who became famous as Toni Hamady in the hit series about an Arab crime family in Berlin. “We keep the fire of what is interesting but we do not keep the ashes,” says Greifeneder. “We always wondered how this whole clan thing started in Berlin. How did we end up here, with police not going to certain areas? With the right wing coming back and the Turkish and Arab communities being attacked? So many mistakes were made. It’s not an excuse for crime but the whole situation is something we thought was very interesting to look at.”

When she first received the 4 Blocks pitch in her previous role at TNT, Greifeneder says it was conceived as a “police series,” but she quickly wanted to switch the narrative. “I felt like we’d seen this topic 1,000 times,” she says. “If the SWAT team goes in I don’t want to go in with them, I want to sit in the apartment with the others and tell it from their point of view.”

The German Lena Dunham

Moving forwards, and with instruction that will excite Germany’s creative community, Greifeneder refuses to stick rigidly to one particular genre but is seeking “creative variety,” while she is on the lookout for the defining German voices of a new generation. “It can be something like what Lena Dunham did with Girls, or what we have with [Richard Gadd’s new HBO show] Half Man. Getting that contemporary zeitgeist is something I want to try and do.”

Working for some of the biggest American brands including MTV, TNT, Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies and Boomerang has given her the ability to tap into these voices during a varied career.

In fact, Greifeneder, whose father was a scientist and who grew up without a television at home – “I was just reading books and playing the piano” – started out as a novelist. She has written several Bridget Jones-esque romcoms, one of which was made into a German movie titled Spin the bottletranslated as Truth or Dare.

When she moved into TV and landed a job at MTV international in the UK, she no longer wanted to write books under her own name because “I was working with so many writers and didn’t want them to say, ‘Oh but this is how you write’.” She did, however, continue penning books under a pseudonym, publishing several children’s novels.

At MTV, which was moving into original programming, she found her true calling, and speaks fondly of overseeing a local version of worldwide hit Pimp My Ride called Pimp My Bicycle.

“At first it was all about storytelling and music,” she adds. “I wanted to be at MTV because I liked music so much and then suddenly I was responsible for programs, acquisitions and production. It was such a free time. I’m really glad I was there back then. It broke my heart to see how [MTV] developed [as the years went on]but I had an amazing time.”

After MTV, she effectively built up TNT in Germany “from scratch,” she explains, which she loved. “This spirit felt like a startup in a big corporation,” she adds. “You had the support and knew what the brands were like, and it was very exciting to do that in Germany. With TNT it was about saying, ‘Hey we’re not a library channel, we do something else’.”

Back to the present day, and Greifender is relishing what’s to come. She appreciates German audiences’ love for American TV and feels she simultaneously has the platform to champion the next generation of local streaming originals, while she will soon start making shows out of her new territory, France.

She doesn’t take her disruptor position lightly and will keep banging that particular drum. “I really like the name of the award because it is very specific,” she adds. “To me disruption is a powerful thing, it means challenging the status quo.”

Seriencamp runs June 9 to 11.