For years, National singer Matt Berninger has been teasing a semi-autobiographical sitcom that he made with his brother, Tom, and his wife, Carin Besser. For a time, however, it looked as if the TV show would never see the light of day. In a recent profile of Berninger and the National for The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich wrote:

In 2014, Berninger and Besser moved to Los Angeles with their four-year-old daughter, Isla, and bought a bungalow in Venice, not far from the ocean. Tom came along, too, and started working out of a guesthouse in the back yard. The three of them were developing a television series based loosely on Tom’s film about the National, but fictionalized. “The pitch was a show not unlike ‘The Monkees’, but more modern,” Berninger said. “A real, honest look at the music industry.” Berninger put together a band and called it Das Apes. He wrote new songs, some of which ended up on his first solo record, “Serpentine Prison” (2020). They filmed a pilot, scouted locations, took meetings with HBO. In the end, they spent nearly a decade working on the show. “It was this endless circle of excitement and failure, excitement and failure,” Tom told me. Berninger said, “We were sober about the chances of actually getting a TV show. But it felt like we got pretty close.”

Finally, in the spring of 2021, they gave up. “There was real, genuine heartbreak,” Berninger said. “A lot of it was connected to my brother. I felt responsible for pulling him along on a long climb toward something that wasn’t going to work out.”

Now, in a new NME interview, Berninger has said the show is still in the works. “Not unlike Frankenstein, a lightning bolt has started its heart again,” the musician exclaimed. “It’s a really great show. It’s called Das Apes, and, with the pandemic, we had to put it down. Yeah, Das Apes is alive, and that’s all I can say. There was nothing happening because of the writers’ strikes and stuff like that, but we’ll see. I’m not going to drown in projects like I was before. I’m gonna make sure that I only take on the things that I can really, really do, but that it is one of them that I really want to do still and that might happen.”

Berninger added:

There’s a lot of detail from autobiographical things, but not just mine—also Walt Martin and Matt Barrick from Walkmen have all kinds of stories. And it’s only one part of it. Tom, my brother, is essentially the hero in everything. And Tom and I play ourselves. My wife isn’t in it, but the whole chemistry and DNA of the show is very different than anything I think that exists. It’s really cool, and I really like it, and it’s joyful. And I guess it’s a funny show. You know, Mistaken for Strangers, the doc that Tom, Carin, and I made, captures the spirit of this television show, but it’s not going to be like a fake doc or anything like that. It might not be anything. It might just be on our laptops forever.

The National have released two albums in 2023: First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track.