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Tatort

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 pm (just after the 8 pm 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.

Concept

The main feature of Tatort is that all participating regional TV stations jointly produce it. Each of the eleven companies involved (the nine German regional TV channels or Landesrundfunkanstalten that together form ARD, plus ORF in Austria and SRF in Switzerland) produces its episodes. Each station usually features more than one team of inspectors in different cities in its region, depending on the size of the producing broadcaster. Each of the roughly 20 active teams appears one to two times each year. Nearly every Sunday, a new episode from a different city premieres on Das Erste; old episodes are often shown through all participating stations as part of their standard programming. The series shares this concept with its former East German counterpart Polizeiruf 110, which is produced as four additional Tatort investigator teams aired under a different series name and opening credits by some regional broadcasters, primarily those that evolved from East German state television.

Every Tatort episode features a different team of inspectors in another city. Combined with the fact that the attacks are 90 minutes long, almost movie-length, and rarely more than 30 episodes in one year, this makes for a cultural phenomenon closer to a string of made-for-TV movies than a typical police series.

This pooling concept was mainly due to the nature of the public broadcast television channel ARD, which is jointly operated by all of Germany's regional public Landesrundfunkanstalten. The 9 regional public broadcasters collect broadcasting fees in their region of Germany (each region comprising one or more federal states), each with multiple radio stations and a regional TV station. Das Erste is produced as a joint national channel with standard national programming. Each regional broadcaster is responsible for parts of the programming, unlike in the US with its network affiliate system. Usually, one to three broadcasters produce one TV programme in cooperation. When Tatort was developed as a series of weekly feature film-long local crime stories, the stated concept was used to distribute financial and organizational efforts.

Apart from the unique joint-pooling system, the series is also characterized by the episode length of around 90 minutes, which allows for more in-depth and psychological fleshing out of the characters. Although almost all episodes feature the investigation of a homicide, it is never just a simple case of whodunit. Often the episode length allows for the crime to be shown in all its aspects, with equal attention focused on the perpetrators and the victims as on the inspectors. On several occasions, the actual police work is just a side note in the story, as the main plot might focus on how one of the persons involved deals with the crime and its aftermath. Episodes also deal with social and political issues.

With the national broadcasting corporations of Austria and Switzerland participating, the episodes of Tatort are currently set in various cities of Germany, Vienna, and Zürich. Initially, each of the participating member stations limited their episodes to one team of investigators in one city: for ease of production, this was mostly the city the broadcast station was in, but over the years, some stations broadcasting over a large regional area have Tatorts playing in several cities. Notably, the WDR (based in Cologne) has three teams of investigators each playing in Cologne, Münster, and Dortmund. Episodes are either produced by the station's production facilities or filmed and often written by outside production houses on behalf of the station. This sometimes leads to situations where, for instance, a Tatort set in Thuringia is produced in Bavaria, with only a handful of scenes shot 'on location' in the town in which the story is supposed to be set in. Consequently, minor roles are sometimes played by actors or extras that do not have a matching regional accent.

A similar concept of independently filming and then pooling episodes was used from 1988 to 1992 in the series Eurocops, jointly produced by several national European TV stations.

Tatort has not found wide distribution in non-German speaking countries, but some episodes were distributed as stand-alone mini-series. Notable examples were the Horst Schimanski episodes which were shown in Finland in the late-1980s and on TV4 in Sweden in 1992, and the 2013 series starring Til Schweiger and Fahri Yardım in Hamburg was shown on the British Channel 4 under the title Nick's Law.

However, Tatort inspired many other TV broadcasters to develop similar city-specific spin-offs for their shows, such as CSI or NCIS.

History

Gunther Witte, dramatist and TV head at WDR (West German Broadcasting Cologne) developed the series against initial resistance. Witte and his successors have ensured that one or two detectives are at the center of every story, and the cases are shown from their perspective; they are usually members of a team, and their lives are also included.

In January 2008, a similarly produced series of radio dramas called ARD Radio Tatort was introduced; new episodes are aired monthly by regional radio stations, but not simultaneously.

In 2012, more than 100,000 people participated in the first and only online game linked to the SWR Tatort production, "Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget."

In January 2014, Tatort received the 50th Grimme Award.

Features

The show is still aired on Sundays at 8:15 p.m. in Germany and Austria and 8:05 p.m. in Switzerland. About 30 episodes are made each year. By May 2018, 1055 episodes had been produced, plus 13 made in Austria and shown only there. Episode nr. 1000 was broadcast on Sunday, 13 November 2016.

The episodes of some series of Tatort, such as the discontinued series about Schimanski, played by Götz George, have become cultural icons.

The opening sequence of each episode has essentially remained the same throughout the decades except for slight changes. Klaus Doldinger composed the title music with Udo Lindenberg on drums.

In East Germany

At the same time the ARD was starting its Tatort format, the DDR had its own police procedural/crime show called Polizeiruf 110 ("Police dial 1-1-0"). The series premiered in 1971, less than a year after the first Tatort. It, too, was a police procedural with various teams of investigators in different cities of the DDR. Still, in contrast to the West, only a tiny part of their cases involved actual homicides. The psychology of the perpetrators and the victims was also more prevalent. The series continued through the 1970s and 80s and even survived the Wende, continuing until 1991.

In 1990, Polizeiruf practiced its brand of German unification with episode 142, "Unter Brüdern" ("Amongst Brothers"), a crossover with the Tatort investigators Schimanski and Thanner (this was co-produced with ARD and a medley of the two series themes were used in the opening intro). Until 1991, the series continued more or less independently for 11 more episodes until episode 153 (22 December 1991), again a crossover, in which Kommissar Thanner becomes the team's superior. Also in 1991, as part of the unification, the DDR's television company DFF was split into the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) and Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandenburg (ORB), while the television stations in the new state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern would be operated as part of the NDR.

As MDR, ORB, and NDR were all partners in the ARD, they were expected to start producing Tatort episodes as well. However, seeing the popularity of Polizeiruf 110, it was decided that the stations would contribute to the Tatort pool but that its episodes would keep the name of Polizeiruf 110 and their own title music and intro. Still, they would be broadcast over all ARD stations on Sunday evening just like (or instead of) the 'western' Tatort.

Reorganising took one and a half years, but on 13 June 1993, the now MDR restarted the series in Tatort format. This first episode was set in Leipzig, just as in 1991. However, today's episodes produced by the MDR are specified in Magdeburg, while those produced by NDR are set in Rostock. The ORB (and later ORB's successor, RBB) has its episodes headed by the same team of investigators but take place in various cities in Brandenburg. In addition, Bavarian Broadcasting BR produces both Polizeiruf and Tatort episodes, both set in Munich. Like the original, the Bavarian Polizeiruf episodes focus more on the psychology of the crimes and more on crimes other than homicides. Over the years, several other 'western' local broadcasters tried to produce Polizeiruf episodes as a sort of 'alternative Tatort' alongside the regular ones. However, all of them stopped after a few episodes.

On 15 May 2015, RBB aired the 350th episode of Polizeiruf 110, the 197th episode of the new format.

In 2013, seeing that Thuringia was so far the only federal state in Germany that had neither a Tatort nor a Polizeiruf set in one of its cities, the MDR ordered two new Tatort series, set in Erfurt and Weimar, respectively. Bavarian companies produce both for the MDR.

As 1-1-0 is the speed dial code for police/emergency dispatch in Germany, but not in Austria, Polizeiruf 110 is broadcast in Austria as Polizeiruf 133.

Table of broadcasters

There have been over 1100 episodes of Tatort, from November 1970 up to the beginning of January 2020 these have been the product of a dozen broadcasters, based around various lead investigators. While some (about 30) have been featured only once or twice, several investigators have featured in multiple episodes. There are 22 current investigative strands, and three have been the subject of over 70 episodes.

Last update: 22 Jul 2023

Soundtracks (selection)

Some Tatort episodes from the 1980s and 1990s included songs that subsequently became quite well known, and two of them reached the top of the charts: "Faust auf Faust (Schimanski)" by Klaus Lage from the Tatort movie On the Killer's Track, and "Midnight Lady" by Chris Norman, written by Dieter Bohlen, which appears on the episode "Der Tausch". Some random selected soundtracks: