The futuristic series The Tribe is growing into a popular success, it lives in the darkness of the minds of many older viewers. Ralph Sanders looks at the series and explains why it is worth switching to a children's channel.

As TV channel with the name Kinderkanal (= children's channel) it's not always easy, even if you try not to mention the obvious thing with the abbreviation KIKA. Although the target audience doesn't stop at the age of ten years at all it can happen easily that even 11 or 12-year-old children feel too old to admit among friends that they watch a children's channel. With increasing age the situation gets worse inevitably until only a target audience of an age switches on again, who watches Wickie and other series, which they know them from their own childhood.

What you can fail to notice if you brush aside the fact that it's a “children's channel” with “kids' stuff” you'll see amongst it The Tribe – A World Without Adults .

The Tribe is a post-apocalyptic series, which takes place in a not more precisely mentioned future. A virus, of completely unknown origin at the beginning, is leading to the sudden death of all adults and the survival of only children and teenagers. They are confronted with a drastically changed world because on the one hand the order existing until then doesn't have a meaning suddenly anymore, and on the other hand the whole sophisticated world has been thrown back into a more or less pre-industrial condition owing to the lack of energy supply – the today plainest things like computers and TV sets have become useless.

The children and teenagers who aren't affected by the virus have to cope with the not so nice new world. There are no adults anymore who tell them what they are allowed to do and what not, and no one has to go to the tiresome school anymore as well; but soon it becomes obvious that the older children have to play the part of the adults to help the younger ones to cope with the changed world and to be able to survive permanently.

Not everyone thinks this way of course – after all a show which wants to appeal to the audience needs also adversaries, who give the heroes a hard time – and various marauding gangs are roaming through the deserted streets and are standing up for chaos and anarchy while others run a slave trade.

But the new world isn't mainly bad, even though everyone is suddenly much more reserved and careful in trusting someone else. If you came to the wrong person in the past you possibly lost your money or an expensive jacket but now your own life is at risk.

In the centre of the events are the already mentioned Mallrats – one of many tribes that give the series its name – who again owe their name to the fact that the group finds shelter in an old shopping mall when fleeing from the Locos, one of the tribes that terrify everyone.

At first sight you might think that the teenagers Amber, Lex and Bray are the protagonists of the series, what has to do with the fact that they belong to the more charismatic characters. But soon it becomes obvious that the principle, on which the world of The Tribe is based, has been transferred to the characters and their actors as well – one is dependent from the other and the attempt to ignore others and to control others is always doomed to fail because the others will unceremoniously refuse to do what this person wants from them. In a world without laws who should be in power are also no guardians of the law, who can take actions against violations.

All of the characters have a certain function in the show they each also offer, in this case the younger audience, the possibility to identify with one of them – after all they are all in the same age group.

After the group has settled in the mall they are confronted with a mass of tasks, which carry even more weight, if you consider that none of them can ask an adult how this and that works and where they can find something particular. The mall has to be protected from the Locos as well as from the Demon Dogs and other “evil” tribes, who just live for the moment and practically don't care much about their future.

At the same time the Mallrats have to maintain order among themselves so that not everyone does what he or she wants. In order to be able to fall back on the familiar technology, they work frantically on the repair of a generator. Besides, they have to provide food since the supplies of tinned food won't last forever. And then there is also the problem of the fatal virus which –as it turns out soon – doesn't harm only adults but shows its disastrous effect much earlier on some teenagers.

You can compare it indeed with a superb detective feat that the Mallrats are successful in exposing the truth about the virus. While the government still said that the virus was brought to the earth from outer space during the first signs of the beginning of a catastrophe, the Mallrats realize after a meticulous search that the horrific disaster was the result of an experiment that went wrong and which should have gone into a completely other direction. As the Mallrats have to learn from the newly joined Danni in the course of the storyline, her father was involved in this experiment, which actually had the purpose to stop the ageing process of human beings. When it became clear that it killed the adults instead and released the younger ones in an uncertain future, it was already too late. They managed to develop an antidote but it couldn't be distributed among the infected people anymore.

This antidote gets into the hands of the Mallrats who realize with a certain feeling of unease that they fall back into the structures of thinking of which they actually thought they had fallen into oblivion after the death of all adults. The antidote means power and the Mallrats have to – if they all like it or not – use this power to work on a new world order. Things happen like they have to happen – the Mallrats can't enjoy very long that they can influence the life outside of the cramped limits of the mall because powers already set to work, which are planning greater things. As after the leader of the Locos, Zoot, was killed relatively early in the storyline, a sect has been formed, which is now out for Zoot's daughter, whose mother is Trudy, who is declared Supreme Mother by this sect, the Chosen, and are supposed to seal the end of the Mallrats.

At the end of the second series it looks so bad for the Mallrats as it didn't for a long time. They're in the grip of the Chosen; Bray and Lex seem to be dead; and Ebony, who was originally with the Locos but joined the Mallrats, is nowhere to be seen. The third series, currently airing in Germany, makes clear that the Mallrats managed to free themselves out of their awkward situation in the end.

The storyline itself shows already that it would be absolutely wrong to brush The Tribe aside as children's series. But this isn't everything that speaks against such a label, which – as described at the beginning – puts off genre fans without a doubt.

There is for one the gloomy initial situation of the series, which shows a world without adults, in which the children and teenagers have to fend for themselves completely and permanently – not really a subject matter of which children's stories are made.

And in contrast to what you typically expect from a series made for a very young audience, the structures and relationships aren't set up rigidly. While you can rely on the fact that in a real children's series the goodies do only good things and the baddies only have in mind to harm others, this principle is never used in The Tribe .

Just like in the real world, the goodies also have a dark side, which you possibly refuse to admit but which exists and which actually gives then depth. And the baddies aren't only bad without reason, what can see especially on characters like the leader of the Locos, Zoot, who almost fulfils a model function – he switched to the side of the “baddies” because life disappointed him and he couldn't handle this disappointment in another way. That he isn't bad to the core turns out especially in the moment when he sneaks into the mall and into his enemies area because he wants to see his newly born son.

This three-dimensionality of the characters also sees to the fact that a seemingly good person switches the sides suddenly and opposes his former friends. The best example is the above-mentioned Trudy, who is a firm member of the Mallrats for nearly two years and who goes over to the Chosen after they kidnapped her baby.

The constant coming and going of familiar characters counteracts to a potential rigidity of the relationships, which leads in many cases to a shifting of the previous structures and rearranges the loyalties of the main characters.

This way the surprise element always continues to exist, as you can never foresee which decision a character takes already in the next episode, which could turn all familiar things upside down.

All the time the danger that the virus could carry off a member of the group is on the back of the viewer's mind and the whole time he or she is in the dark about who'll make it and who won't.

How much the producers work with the expectations of the audience and how much they are willing to take risks becomes clear at the end of the first series when of all people Amber and Zandra die, of whom we thought they were essential. And then they aren't even victims of the insidious virus but are killed in a comparatively banal but definitely unexpected fire disaster.

This again shows more than clearly that The Tribe isn't a taboo for viewers older than ten or twelve years, because especially in a children's series the death of one of the protagonists is only rarely part of the storyline, while it is formulated with some exaggeration– nearly nothing unusual to take characters out of the series this way in The Tribe .

Another factor, which speaks against the possible presumption that the series lacks of standard, is the mass of strands of the plot, which run through all episodes. Depending at which point of the series you are, you can easily count fifteen or more main characters who have an important part in every single episode but who are all so independent that they can come up with an own strand of plot.

In New Zealand the fourth series of the show is currently airing, at the end of which it will already have more than 200 half-hour episodes and there is no end in sight. There are dimensions which allow The Tribe to take it on with any other “adult” soap opera and so it isn't a surprise that KIKA recommends this series under the label of a “future soap”. The young actors are mostly pleasantly fresh faces, at least for German relations, while many of them are already a celebrity in New Zealand.

Over here some genre fans might have already seen Caleb Ross (Lex), Jaimee Kaire-Gataulu (Cloe), Meryl Cassie (Ebony) and Daniel James (Zoot) who have all had guest roles in Xena and/or Hercules , which were filmed in New Zealand as well, as everybody knows.

In Germany the Tribe enthusiasm skips from TV to other media as well. Besides the recently released CD to the series, the first two novels to the series, which sum up the beginning for the “old” fans of the series and which offer the possibility for new fans to get into the series even in its third year and to catch up, are available as book (Dino) since March.

Now it's only necessary to forget your date of birth for some minutes and to switch to the children's channel – and to dunk into the world of The Tribe .