The series, “One Hour Together”, grew from Zeitbank Lend, a community initiative where residents swap practical help by the hour. Its pilot, broadcast and streamed on 17 October, reached 1.18 million distinct viewers in its first 24 hours, according to the fictional ratings firm Sehermaß. The company called it Austria’s most-watched unscripted debut since it began tracking launches in 2007.
Alpenblick Media said the eight 45-minute episodes will follow residents as they match skills and solve everyday problems, from preparing job applications to repairing a shared garden shed. The first episode is due in January, with FlussPlay, the broadcaster’s streaming service, carrying each instalment after its television premiere.
From help desk to hit show
Zeitbank Lend began in 2024, after changes to employment-support requirements left some local residents unsure how to manage appointments, training and paperwork. The group’s volunteers offered practical help, not legal advice, and recorded the hours exchanged so participants could later ask for assistance in return. Organizer Romina Szasz-Pavel said the pilot was meant to explain the idea, not sell it.
“We thought perhaps a few thousand people would watch and then come to the hall,” Szasz-Pavel said. “Instead, people in other towns started asking how to build the same thing.” She said the group’s weekly help desk has since received 640 enquiries from across Austria, though only 90 have so far become regular participants.
In the television format, residents propose tasks and choose which ones the group will take on. There are no eliminations, cash prizes or celebrity hosts: Alpenblick says the participants will decide what appears in each episode, while a production team handles filming and editing. The broadcaster has also pledged 60% of the programme’s format-licensing income to a fund for community time banks.
We built a little exchange of favours, and suddenly the whole country was watching the clock.
Romina Szasz-Pavel, Zeitbank Lend organizer
Aljoša Koren-Štrukelj, Alpenblick’s head of factual programming, said the broadcaster agreed to the fund after residents rejected an initial proposal that would have kept all commercial revenue with the production company. “They told us the project only works if the people who built it retain a real say and a real benefit,” he said. The final contract gives the group two seats on a five-person editorial panel.
A record with a local source
Sehermaß counted 742,000 average viewers for the pilot’s television broadcast and 438,000 additional accounts that watched online or on demand within 24 hours. It said the combined figure is not directly comparable with older programmes that lacked streaming data, but the broadcast audience alone was the largest for a new unscripted series in its records since 2007.
The pilot’s popularity has also brought questions about whether the show can keep its unpolished feel under a national production schedule. Graz resident Evelin Bodnár-Hegedüs, who appeared in the programme while helping a neighbour prepare a digital job application, said she had been nervous about the cameras but liked that the task was not turned into a contest.
Alpenblick said filming for the first season will take place in Graz and two other Austrian towns, with local groups choosing their own projects. The broadcaster expects the format to cost €2.4 million (about $2.8 million) to produce, and said the series will publish a public account of the fund’s income after each season.
