When I was growing up in the U.S., the TV show “season” was from September – May. Shows would have anywhere from 20-25 episodes per “season” which aired weekly, with re-runs of that season’s episodes shown in place of new episodes for the remaining weeks of the year. Occasionally, an episode would be pre-empted in its time-slot, replaced for a special event, such as the Oscars, the Super Bowl, Election Day news coverage, etc. But, if you were a fan of, say, Starsky and Hutch, you would know that every Tuesday at 10pm there would be an episode of that particular show in that time slot. And you’d know that until that show either got cancelled or decided to stop production, the episodes for that show would be produced regularly each successive year. There wouldn’t be a planned gap of 2 years, for example, between “Season 1” and “Season 2” of any given show.

Since I haven’t lived in the U.S. in a long time, and haven’t watched first-run U.S. network television series in even longer, I don’t know if it still works that way for TV shows in the U.S.  But that’s at least the way it worked when I was a kid.

However, it’s apparently never been that way here in Germany. For one thing, the TV seasons also seem to start and stop randomly through the year. But, that may be to allow the shows to stagger their “seasons” throughout the year, since the “season” isn’t that long. As far as we can tell, each Krimi series seems to produce maybe 8-10 episodes at most. Consider that show Ein Fall für Zwei that I mentioned last week, which has produced 300 episodes over the past 31 years. Tatort is seemingly the exception with 30 episodes per year, but it’s really a collection of 15+ different series, each of which produces 2 at most for the year.

But at least Ein Fall für Zwei and Tatort seem to have had seasons in each successive year since they first aired. However, recent series seem to be following a different pattern, where their “seasons” are separated by years.

Case in point: a show titled Mord mit Aussicht, “Murder with a View”. It’s a fun comedy-police procedural, where the main characters are quirky, and there is a murder mystery, but always with a comicly odd twist. I can’t really think of a good North American equivalent to compare this to: is there anything like WKRP in Cincinatti where the characters solve a murder in every show? I can’t think of any North American show quite like that.

But in Mord mit Aussicht, the head of the detective team is a woman who was a hot-shot police detective on the fast track to becoming the head of the Homicide Squad in Cologne.  However, she does something that puts her afoul with her higher-ups, and she gets assigned to head a 3-man squad (including her) in a tiny little town in the country. The main conceit of the show is all about how she’s completely out-of-her-depth in this setting, while at the same time completely able to recognize murder when she sees it. Indeed, the murder rate in the little town in the show seems to have soared since her arrival,  since what might have been termed an accident or death-by-natural causes always turns out to be in fact a murder while she’s around.

Anyway, it’s quirky and fun and we have become fans of the show. So, when the second season of it ended in December, I looked on the Internet to see if there would be more seasons starting soon. The good news: they are making more episodes that will begin filming in Spring of 2013.

The odd news: the new season won’t begin until fall of 2014.

In fact, it turned out that there was also a 2-year gap between Season 1 and Season 2.  I just don’t get that kind of gap. Is that something new they are doing on TV in general these days? Or is that just here?

Now, one side effect is that the German approach leaves all the actors with time on their hands and so they regularly turn up on other shows. Chris and I have joked that apparently there are only 30 or so actors actively working in German TV shows right now, as we’re starting to recognize them as they pop up on different shows. The guy who’s playing the slightly neer-do-well son-in-law one long-running detective series? He’s now one of the regular police detectives on Stohlberg’s team. The goofy police inspector from the still-running Father Brown series? He popped up recently as the star of a cute TV movie about a detective and the romance writer he falls in love with. I belatedly realized that the fact that we recognized one young actress in last week’s Der Kriminalist as having been a regular on some other show meant that a) she might a big-name actress and therefore  b) she would probably be the murderer. After all, if she was famous since she wouldn’t have had just a bit part as a guest star on another show, right?

Chris and I wonder if all this overlapping of the actors is an indication that there’s some sort of  “studio system” approach to producing these Krimi series in Germany. You know, the system like in Hollywood in the 1930s-1950s, where the same actors would appear over and over again in a variety of roles. But this is different in some ways. For example, the actor who plays the lead in Stohlberg, a series that is still running, showed up in a major supporting role in a recent Father Brown episode, playing a character completely unlike his role on Stohlberg. And that seemed odd. I mean, I wouldn’t have expected to see someone like Telly Salvalas, who played Kojak, show up on something like Murder She Wrote, for example, until after the Kojak series had ended.

But, with the TV shows here spanning decades, with each show only producing a few episodes per year, I guess it makes sense that the actors have to branch out a bit. So, even if they are the star of one show, perhaps they’ll take a supporting role in another show just to keep their hand-in and/or pay the rent, etc.

And I suppose that perhaps Chris and I notice this more because we’re not as familiar with the shows, and we don’t always understand all the dialog. So, we’re left with a lot of time during the episode to ponder if, for example, the guy in the hat in this episode looks familiar because he was lurking in the shadows during the opening murder scene at the beginning of this episode, or if we saw him playing the bad guy in some other show the day before. And just last night we spotted a woman who played the crazy and murderous wanna-be girlfriend of a guy on one show playing the crazy, wanna-be girlfriend of the murderer on another show. Almost the same character, definitely the same actress. It’s a small world – at least for those who inhabit the world of the German Krimi.