Melodrama like this is frowned upon by critics...

And that's why you don't have any English speaking version of this kind of show. The closest you'll come to something like this in the U.S. is Breaking Bad. In the U.K., it's Downton Abbey.

But Gran Hotel is a show that just doesn't care about creating any false semblance of realism, which is so brave, and actually much more "real" than either of the other shows I mentioned. Why? Simple. Gran Hotel is what shows like Downton Abbey WANT to be, but can't for the simple reason that studio execs feel their audience would merely scoff at such "pure" melodrama, so instead they try to fool our sensibilities into believing we're watching something of a higher order, which we really are not.

Weaving a plot that is so jam-packed with twists and turns, made possible by flat, one-dimensional characters, is hardly high art, but it is a literary skill of the first order in my opinion. Why is it that to this day critics praise Charles Dickens for this approach to storytelling, but snicker at the likes of Gran Hotel for following in that tradition?

This is especially true of U.S. literary critics, who endlessly prefer realism, and three-dimensional, rounded characters that we get to know intimately.

Frankly, I think it's time the English-speaking world was re-introduced to this whimsical form of storytelling. It's just plain FUN.