“Tatort” is one of the last great German TV events; the new season has just started. Several million viewers still tune in to ARD on Sunday evening when the intro with the famous crosshairs, which has remained the same for 50 years, flickers across the screens. But even though the channel relies on continuity in the credits, ‘Tatort’ is by no means a closed format in which each episode follows the same pattern: Not only are the cities and researchers changing, there are also serious differences in style.
The humorous crime scenes in Münster with Boerne and Thiel have little in common with a film like ‘Born in Pain’, which even provoked Tarantino comparisons. The Hamburg action-crime scenes with Til Schweiger, on the other hand, have nothing to do with ‘Good and Evil’, which director Jan Schütte staged without a script. Also “Crime Scene: Mercy. Too late”, the 1243rd (!) episode last Sunday, offended a large part of the audience with experimental approaches and a symbolic rain of blood.
And then there are films like ‘Tatort: Krokodilwächter’ from 1996: The fourth case of the Berlin investigative duo Roiter and Zorowski (Winfried Glatzeder and Robinson Reichel) was only broadcast once – and then ended up in the poison cabinet. What happened there?
“Crocodile Watcher”: Already the second Berlin “Tatort” episode that ended up in the poison cupboard!
Roiter and Zorowski conducted research in Berlin twelve times between 1996 and 1998, although the reviews were largely devastating. Criticisms included the lack of chemistry between the two actors, failed attempts at humor and lackluster video optics, which were the result of austerity measures by the then producing broadcaster SFB.
The duo’s very first case – ‘Death in a Jaguar’ – was never repeated after being shown once on TV and being praised with accusations of anti-Semitism. And Crocodile Watcher suffered the same fate just three episodes later. As a result, the two police officers have to solve two murders and uncover a trafficking in Eastern European women in the process.
Critics and the public tore up the ‘crime scene’, and even politicians got involved: Hans-Otto Wilhelm, at the time the media representative of the CDU/CSU faction in the Bundestag, described the film as ‘brutal, sexist and inhuman’, which he explained, among other things, with ‘unbearable scenes of violence’. which are particularly “reprehensible” “when women have to endure sex and violence in a degrading way.”
“Undermines the level of the series without any effort,” was also their opinion , which had not exactly treated its predecessors with prudishness. If you are curious at this point, even if you have nothing else to do with the “crime scene”, we have to disappoint you: due to the enormous outrage, ARD keeps the film strictly secret to this day, and neither neither a television repeat nor another publication can be expected in the foreseeable future.