Anniversary: ​​The Münster “Tatort” turns 20: Germany’s most popular crime thriller

anniversary
The Münster “Tatort” turns 20: Germany’s most popular crime thriller

They somehow have to get along with each other: the stocky, lazy chief inspector and FC St. Pauli fan Frank Thiel from Hamburg and the eloquent-elegant but also blase-arrogant forensic doctor Professor Karl-Friedrich Boerne.

Together they form the team of the Münster “Tatort”, which in 2022 will be in existence for 20 years. The 40th case comes on January 16. In the film “The Devil’s Long Breath”, Thiel suffers amnesia. According to Westdeutscher Rundfunk, three new crime thrillers will be available for broadcast on ARD’s first in the anniversary year.

For years, the Münster “Tatort” from WDR with Axel Prahl (61) and Jan Josef Liefers (57) in the lead roles has repeatedly been Germany’s most watched TV film of the year. The episode “Fang Shot” was even seen by around 14.6 million viewers when it was first broadcast in 2017.

This is still the highest number of viewers for a TV film since 1992. At the beginning of the 90s, “Tatort” investigators like Stoever and Brockmöller (Manfred Krug and Charles Brauer) or Schimanski (Götz George) brought more people to the screen than Münster today.

But that was of course still a time without the Internet and smartphone and the many other moving image offers of today.

Incidentally, the second most successful Münster “crime scene” was not one from before YouTube and Instagram, i.e. from the early days of the Münster team, but the only episode in 2021.

A good 14.2 million saw the slapstick thriller “Rhythm and Love” on May 2nd about free love, jealousies and an organic commune. However, one has to say that the film fell into the weeks of corona-related nocturnal exit restrictions.

Since 2002 there have been two “Tatort” crime stories from Münster every year. 2021 was only the second year after 2018 with only one new case from the team.

The first Münster “Tatort” was broadcast on October 20, 2002, the second six weeks later (December 1, 2002).

There have been 39 episodes so far. The cult around Thiel and Boerne gradually emerged. It wasn’t until the end of 2008 that the Münster “crime scene” had more than 10 million viewers for the first time; Since 2010, however, every new case has managed to do this in the first. Since 2013, every new episode has had more than 12 million TV viewers, some even over 14 million.

This also gave rise to weariness. Ten years ago, the presenter Sarah Kuttner, then in her early thirties, wrote in “Spiegel” about the “Tatort” hype: “This is the new thing that we cool people have had to watch for some time. A kind of new narrow-mindedness. I think these thrillers are terribly old-fashioned and dreary. Nothing is worse than the sentence: The best “crime scene” is in Münster. »

But that doesn’t change anything about the event character of the thrillers from Münster, who also thrive on other characters like Thiel’s «Vadder», the old 68er and taxi driver Herbert (Claus Dieter Clausnitzer), the heavily smoking public prosecutor Wilhelmine Klemm (the powerful-voiced Mechthild Großmann ) and of course Boerne’s small-stature assistant Silke Haller, known as “Alberich” (Christine Urspruch).

The average number of viewers for the first “Tatort” broadcasts is around nine million. But when the Münster crime thriller comes, Sunday evening becomes a “crime scene” evening for another three to five million people. A TV campfire of the nation, even if comedy often beats logic in the films, some find the scripts even brazen, for example when Roland Kaiser in a guest role (“Summ, Summ, Summ”, 2013) as a pop singer the – höhö – name Roman King wears.

Another secret of success is probably the German love for the province. Contrary to some perception in the media and the public, the Federal Republic consists not only of metropolises such as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, but also of the smaller cities and towns and of course the rural population.

The contemplative bicycle and student city of Münster ranks 20th in the list of major German cities – behind Wuppertal, Bielefeld and Bonn; and before Mannheim, Karlsruhe and Augsburg.

It probably represents the country more than, for example, Cologne, Stuttgart and Frankfurt and their often relevant, socially critical “crime scenes” manage it.

The features section can complain about the thrillers from the Münsterland – many TV viewers obviously feel well taken care of and well entertained by the films.

And even if the main actors Prahl and Liefers live privately in Berlin: The scripts celebrate the (so-called) province. With their little jokes and clichés, they are a moral picture of German sensitivities and the characters are highly recognizable.

dpa