Free Rainer - Dein Fernseher lügt (2007)

The equally successful and arrogant television producer Rainer caters to viewers’ needs with soap operas, talk shows, and game shows such as “Get Your Superbaby.” This earns high ratings for the commercial broadcaster TTS, but the emotional coldness of his workplace increasingly drives him to despair, so he tries to make life more bearable by regularly using cocaine. One day, while driving his Jaguar XK8—which he had previously damaged—he is deliberately rammed at high speed from the side by a young woman named Pegah. She wants revenge on Rainer because a poorly researched report of his drove her grandfather to suicide. Rainer survives the attack with serious injuries. As doctors resuscitate him, nightmares lead him to realize that his productions at TTS contribute to “the dumbing-down of the masses through the media.” After being fired, he and Pegah set out to investigate the reasons for the success of low-quality television programs and bring about a change. In the course of their own research, he learns more about how ratings are measured, which he considers overrated and unfair because certain groups in society are not included. During a tour of the headquarters of IMA, the Institute for Media Analysis, which is responsible for measuring ratings, he steals a monitoring device and abducts an employee, Phillip. The insider, who suffers from social anxiety and is interested in conspiracy theories, agrees to help Rainer and Pegah with their plan to manipulate the ratings, and gives them a secret list of the households that determine the ratings. After confirming through a telephone survey that changing channels really does affect the current ratings, Pegah suggests replacing some of the monitoring devices with modified ones that they can control remotely. To fund the scheme, Rainer sells all his possessions. The trio recruits several unemployed people to help them. Pretending to work for IMA, they install the modified devices in several households. But increasingly serious problems arise. When one of the helpers causes a serious traffic accident while drunk, Rainer must, at Pegah’s insistence, pay the last of the money he has available as security. At a crisis meeting, the helpers decide to keep working even without pay, and the saboteurs come up with a new plan. They now tamper with the telephone lines that transmit the data, allowing them to intervene while it is being sent from households to IMA. They travel all over Germany to “free” enough households. At their headquarters, set up in a remote hotel, they achieve their first successes in influencing the ratings. The public is astonished that sophisticated documentaries and discussions are becoming increasingly popular at the expense of TTS and other channels. Journalists speculate that a social revolution is underway, with people confidently turning away from low-quality television. The success also helps Rainer, with Pegah’s support, to break free of drugs and enjoy life. However, Rainer’s former programming director, Maiwald, who is coming under increasing pressure because TTS’s ratings are falling, learns about his former employee’s new activities. He meets him at the conspirators’ headquarters and puts pressure on him. When Rainer refuses to meet his demands, Maiwald returns with the police to have the group arrested. By then, however, the group has removed all the computers and moved to another house. There, they read in the newspaper that television viewers have become accustomed to the high-quality programming and continue watching worthwhile shows, even though Rainer and his helpers are no longer manipulating the ratings. Encouraged by their success, the group turns to its next project to improve society. They begin manipulating data from shoppers in the test market of Haßloch, where they suspect another imbalance: a small group of “testers” setting and shaping society’s standards.