Tatort (1970)

Genre

crime television series

Country

Germany, Austria, Switzerland

Length

57 seasons, 1338 episodes

Rated

12

Rating

6.2 of 10 from 124 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This is a German-language police procedural series where different teams of detectives solve crimes in their own cities. Each episode focuses on the setting as much as the investigation, with longer runtimes allowing for deeper character development.

long-runningproceduralvariedslow-burnthoughtfulregionalcharacter-driven

What happens

Tatort ("Crime Scene") is a German-language police procedural television series that has been running continuously since 1970 with 30 feature-length episodes per year, making it the longest-running German TV drama. Developed by the German public-service broadcasting organization ARD for their channel Das Erste, it is unique in its approach in that it is jointly produced by all of the organization's regional members as well as its partnering Austrian and Swiss national public-service broadcasters, whereby every regional station contributes several episodes to a common pool. As a result of this, Tatort is a collection of different police stories where different police teams solve crimes in their own cities, with uniqueness in architecture, customs, and dialects of the cities being a distinctive part of the series. Often, the city, not the police force, is the real main character of an episode. The fact that local stations each produce a small number of episodes per year has enabled longer episodes (approximately 90 minutes), which in turn allows each episode to exhibit greater characterisation than other weekly TV dramas. The first episode was broadcast on 29 November 1970. Episodes are broadcast on ARD's main channel Das Erste, on Sunday evenings at the prime viewing time of 8:15 p.m. (just after the 8 p.m. Tagesschau news) around three times a month. Reruns are often shown by various regional ARD stations and on foreign broadcasters. Alongside the member stations of the ARD, the national Austrian broadcasting corporation Österreichischer Rundfunk joined the production pool in 1971 and aired the program on its ORF 2 channel. Switzerland's Schweizer Fernsehen joined the collection from 1990 to 2001 and again in 2011. It distributes its episodes through its channel SRF 1 and Play SRF streaming app. The series Polizeiruf 110, which was produced by East Germany's state TV broadcaster as a counterpart to the West German Tatort and has a similar regional production approach, is still produced by ARD's regional broadcasters Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR), Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB), Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) and Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR). Polizeiruf 110 shares the Sunday night prime time slot on Das Erste with Tatort. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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