Crap Happens

The Bass Drop at the Edge of Kacken

The hometown return comes with its own special kind of humiliation. You leave swearing you will conquer the world, and you come back eighteen years later carrying nothing but a duffel bag and a meticulously cultivated aura of failure. *Crap Happens*—or *Kacken an der Havel*, to use its far superior German title — understands this indignity in its bones. The nine-episode Netflix series doesn't just lean into the prodigal son trope; it shoves it into a ditch. Our protagonist, Toni (played by real-life German rapper Anton "Fatoni" Schneider), has spent two decades in Berlin telling people he is on the verge of hip-hop stardom. In reality, he bakes pizzas. He only goes back to his cursed rural village when his mother suddenly dies. How does she die? Trying to rescue a duck.



Whether that premise sounds like a tragedy or a punchline depends entirely on your tolerance for German surrealism. Brothers Alex and Dimitrij Schaad, who created the show, seem perfectly happy hovering somewhere in the middle. I've been fascinated by the Schaads since their body-swap drama *Skin Deep*, mostly because they refuse to pick a tonal lane. Here, they construct a world that feels both hyper-specific and entirely absurd. Toni arrives in Kacken expecting to mourn, only to discover he has a 13-year-old son named Charly and a bizarrely young stepfather named Johnny Carrera. It is the sort of setup that could easily collapse into sitcom mush. (And frankly, in episode four, the pacing does drag when the dialogue over-explains the generational divide we can already see on screen). Yet, the show mostly avoids cheap sentimentality by keeping its characters slightly abrasive.



Watch the way Schneider carries himself in the kitchen during the wake. His shoulders slump. His hands don't know where to go without a pizza peel or a microphone. Casting an actual rapper pays off here, not because of the musical performances, but because Schneider understands the desperate, hollow-eyed exhaustion of an artist who knows his window has closed. Contrast that with Dimitrij Schaad’s performance as Johnny Carrera. Schaad is practically vibrating with chaotic energy, wearing what looks like a vintage green corduroy bomber jacket as a shield against reality. There is a tactile awkwardness to their interactions — two men forced into a family hierarchy that makes zero logical sense. The DMT blog accurately called the series "so absurd and foolish that it is actually entertaining and even unpredictable". I don't really know I agree with the "foolish" part. There is a very sharp intelligence beneath the silliness.



Maybe it takes an outsider's art form — hip-hop transplanted into the deep German provinces — to articulate this specific flavor of mid-life dread. *Crap Happens* doesn't offer neat resolutions for Toni's stalled career or his sudden plunge into fatherhood. Instead, it offers a beautifully grim portrait of survival in a town you swore you'd never see again. I suspect some viewers might find the tonal shifts jarring, snapping from genuine grief to slapstick village eccentricity in the span of a single scene. But life, especially the kind that forces you to bury a parent who died for a duck, rarely picks a genre. You just have to nod your head to the beat, even when the rhythm is entirely broken.