The double episode “In the family”

M.an does not always choose its own brand ambassadors. In the case of the “Tatort”, next to the “Tagesschau” the most important main brand of the ARD, is Olaf Scholz, who has breakfast with all the files and obviously struts with the bazooka. The branded thing has to be understood literally, because the Federal Ministry of Finance is responsible for around fifty Deutsche Post special stamps every year. Scholz’s house is currently issuing a “crime scene” stamp. The occasion is the 50th birthday of the murder and council series, the first episode of which has not yet been produced as “crime scene”, “Taxi to Leipzig”, and was shown on November 29, 1970. It started – just like the last episode, which is just as impressive – with a headless attitude.

The stamp was designed by Bonn graphic artist Thomas Steinacker, who brazenly mounted a motif from the iconic series opening credits into the outline of a CRT screen in front of a museum test image: pure nostalgia, indulge in old sizes. None of the young digital Killefitz that ARD is so proud of.

For the anniversary, a lot of low-budget add-ons were downloaded on social networks: quizzes, games, chats, mash-ups, congratulations, interviews, a fun mockumentary about the new Bremen team about to start working (Jasna Fritzi Bauer , Luise Wolfram and Dar Salim). “The ‘Tatort’ will also face changing viewing habits in the near future,” announced WDR program director Jörg Schönenborn at the 50-year-old – and it sounds like a threat. Apparently the “Tatort” app has gone so badly that it is now meekly discontinued.

With the force of a classic tragedy

Perhaps Steinacker’s suspicion is right: Sunday night’s “crime scene” fire is no longer explained by the fact that the series is extraordinarily innovative, but by the fact that it is just that. What may once have been a ritual of spiritual purification at the end of the week – the Augean stable thrown down -, since Schimanski also a proletarian-social democratic response to Helmut Kohl’s republic, is now perhaps just a ritual of the appointed time. Less law and order than the common law.

In the midst of great online scrambling, the Germans want one last place where there is still an analogue flare; the average of 620,000 digital views does not even reach a tenth of the linear audience. It can be fun for the audience, even if it doesn’t matter if the same lines are repeated over and over again (i.e. more Münster than Weimar). Otherwise too large deviations from the norm where you were last night will be reliably punished. Wanting to move the “crime scene”, this little grandmother dressed as a wolf, to the other side of linear television seems like an act of desperation: a production like this (ridiculously cheap) can hardly hold a candle to the high-end series around the world. world.

Almost as many are the inspectors’ arias, a consequence of age, of anniversaries: the 25th case of Stuttgart, the 25th anniversary of Lena Odenthal, the thousandth episode, the millionth Currywurst. The anniversary that is currently being celebrated is real. And with appreciation it can be reported that the ARD is an unusually strong aesthetically and narrative double episode, completely humorous and devoid of lessons: a mafia plot under the beautiful and multi-meaning title “In the family”, which is far from the the usual clichés the force a classic tragedy unfolds and ultimately transcends the genre. The only thing that’s not working recently is the interconnection of two “crime scene” teams, which leads to an absurdly high density of investigators.