Summary
The Swiss series New Heights effectively intersects the family drama with the corporate world, the conflicts between family and industrial farming, the pressures of local interests, and the opposition between semi-rural and urban cultures over the fate of a farm near Zürich.
Review
The inheritance and fate of a farm near Zürich gives rise to complex and shifting conflicts between members of a family.
The Wys run an old-fashioned dairy farm called Neumatt (original title of the series). One of the sons, Michi (Julian Koechlin), pursues a promising career as a consultant in Zürich; His sister Sarah (Sophie Hutter) runs a gym in the town near the farm, and his younger brother, Lorenz (Jérome Humm), is the one who seems destined to carry on the family tradition, graduating from an agricultural school. But when the family must meet to decide the future of the farm, a series of conflicts over competing interests are unleashed, generating shifting alliances between its members, as if it were a petit bourgeois Succession. This new dynamic will also stir up and bring to light some family secrets.
At the same time, Michi's consulting firm is working to save a large Swiss dairy company from bankruptcy, which introduces us to corporate dealings related to the dairy industry. In this way, Nuevas Alturas effectively crosses the family drama with the corporate drama, the conflict between family and industrialized agriculture and the pressures of local interests as well as the semi-rural culture with the urban.
With a beginning that threatens to be a thriller, the series outlines its characters very well (sometimes contradictory, sometimes unscrupulous) and confronts them with situations that seem to have no way out but that they later overcome thanks to a generally well-thought-out script. The protagonist, Michi, is the ambitious, impulsive and moody successful gay consultant who is suddenly forced to combine his corporate work with a return to the family farm. But perhaps the most captivating character in the series is Katharina, his mother, in a formidable work by Rachel Braunschweig.
