It’s going to take more than one post to cover various points about the German detective TV shows, called Krimis, that we’ve been watching, but to kick things off, we’ll start with the granddaddy of all the shows, called Tatort (“crime scene”).

Tatort has been around for 40+ years, with well over 800 episodes and counting. Compare that with  U.S. TV shows, where Gunsmoke ran for 20 years, and 600+ episodes, or Law and Order, which ran for 20 years and just over 400 episodes.

An article in the NYTimes from 2009 has a good summary of what it’s all about.  It’s a weekly TV series, with a famous title sequence that starts with eyes looking this way and that; here’s a clip of that opening I found on YouTube.  Neither the opening sequence nor that theme song have changed since 1970. Tatort airs every Sunday at 8:15pm, with 30 new episodes per year, on average.  In its heyday, before cable channels added so many more viewing possibilities, nearly 75% of German households tuned in to watch it. The plot was then the major “water-cooler” theme the next morning in offices all over the country. It doesn’t command quite that market share anymore, but it’s still one of the top shows shown here. Whenever we mention to locals that we’re trying to watch German TV shows, the first thing people say is that we must watch Tatort. Culturally, it’s an institution.

Now, while it’s technically a single TV series, it’s not set in a single place nor is there a single set of detectives.  It’s sort of like a bunch of different detective shows, which are shown under the umbrella of at single series. In any given week, the crime will take place in a particular German city, with a set of detectives who work in that city solving the crime.  There’s usually either a pair of police detectives, or sometimes a lone-wolf detective, depending on particular city-variation. Each set of detectives appear only in episodes set in “their”city, i.e. one week the action may take play in Berlin, the next week in Frankfurt, the next in Münster, and so forth. That NY Times article says that in 2009, there were 15 different locations/set of detectives; there’s a complete list of all the places and detectives that have appeared in the series in Wikipedia (in English), if you’re interested.

If you figure that there are only 30 new episodes per year, you can see that each location (and set of actors) doesn’t film more than 1-2 episodes in a single year. So, even thought some of the detective characters might have been around for decades, no one actor has been in all 800 episodes.

Each Tatort utilizes the locations where the episodes take place. The show is notable for characters speaking in the local dialects, and for incorporating local customs and traditions from each city into the plot where possible. What’s also interesting is that there is a completely different vibe to the different episodes, depending on the locations and the personality of the detectives. Some shows are serious, with the main characters are almost brooding and never crack a smile, while a few — including the episodes set in Münster — have detectives who are more relaxed, and sub-plots are played for humor. So even though it’s technically the same show, it’s like watching different series, which seemingly randomly change from week to week in the same time slot.

At least the was part of my initial take on the idea of this show, being someone who is  a) relatively new to Germany and b) doesn’t speak German fluently.

Now, the NY Times article comments that Tatort episodes are never very violent or bloody, and perhaps that’s true. But the first time Chris and turned on a Tatort, it had a creepiness factor that was through-the-roof in my opinion. Not my thing – give me a basic Columbo or Jerry Orbach-era Law and Order any day, where it’s more about the mystery and solving it, rather than creepy criminals stalking and preying on helpless women. Unfortunately,  I initially got the impression that Tatort was, as a series, always creepy, and so we didn’t try another one for months.

But now that we’ve gotten more knowledgeable about how to figure out which Tatort detective teams offer a more standard police-procedural mystery, we have tried it again. We have a lot to choose from; while the new episodes are on Sunday night, it’s in re-runs all over the dial every day. There are 800+ old ones available, after all. Unfortunately, all the episodes are all labelled Tatort in the schedule, so you can’t tell by the title which ones are which. But Chris usually has patience to read the descriptions one-by-one in our on-screen listing, looking for ones that are set in a city that we know to have scripts that are a little bit lighter in tone.  So, we’re getting a bit more exposure to Tatort as a result.

However, we still have a tendency to bypass Tatort if there’s something else on to try. I think that while some of the attraction for Germans is to have a lot of those regionalisms in each episode (accents, language, etc), those things don’t make it easy for a non-native to follow, unfortunately. On Sunday nights, the channel that shows the new Tatort episodes broadcasts them with subtitles in German –  closed-captioning, in other words. Those subtitles fly by awfully quickly, though, and don’t always match the spoken German, which can be a bit disconcerting. But at least it’s something to help give a clue about the words being spoken when nothing sounds familiar.

When shown in re-runs, though, the Tatort episodes are played without closed-captioning.  I don’t know why. But that is only one of the many mysteries that surround watching a Tatort when you’re a newcomer to to watching die Krimis in Germany.