Farewell to the Frankfurt “Tatort” team
Clear criticism and weak ratings
At the end of their 19th and final “crime scene” case, Margarita Broich and Wolfram Koch, alias Janneke and Brix, finally get closer to each other.
© HR/Press Office
A bomb ended Janneke and Brix’s “crime scene” careers. Despite the brutal finale, many fans are disappointed.
Only 6.09 million people followed according to AGF video research the 19th case of Janneke and Brix on Sunday evening in the first. For comparison: That’s around two million viewers less than the regular Black Forest episode a week before and the Vienna edition from two weeks ago as the start of the current “Tatort” season. This meant that ARD still secured the day’s primetime victory with a 22.2 percent market share in the total audience, but the long-established “Tatort” team would have wished for a more spectacular farewell in ratings.
Frankfurt “Tatort”: Criticism of the finale, praise for Matthias Brandt
Reactions were also mixed within the “Tatort” fan community. Although the vast majority of viewers praised Matthias Brandt’s performance as very artistic but certainly successful, only very few people were able to find anything positive about the film’s brutal ending. For example, on the popular “Tatort” fansite “wiewardertatort” commented Some fans via Instagram said that the explosion and the death of the two were unnecessary. “It would have been a much nicer ending if the two of them had just driven off into the night…” it says, among other things. Things had been sizzling between Brix and Janneke for years, but neither of them dared to talk to the other about the romantic energy. Until just before the fatal explosion, after both had finally revealed their mutual feelings.
Many other commentators take the same line. “What kind of ending was that?! You could have just left it alone,” you can read. Another follower of the fan page finds more drastic words: “What a sh…!!! Brix and Janneke don’t deserve that. Matthias Brandt alone was sensational.” Others also criticize the ending in particular, but explicitly praise the performance of the former “Polizeiruf 110” commissioner from Munich, who turned his back on his role as investigator Hanns von Meuffels in 2018. “Phenomenal”, “fantastic” or even “genius” can be read there as a reaction to Matthias Brandt.
It was announced in December 2023 that Broich and Koch would end their “Tatort” careers. The reason the two actors gave at the time was that they wanted to devote more time to other projects. In June 2024, the broadcaster informed the public about the succession plan for the Hessian “Tatort” offshoot from Frankfurt: the first episode with the new team consisting of Melika Foroutan (48) and Edin Hasanović (32) is scheduled to be broadcast in 2025. It is planned that the new commissioners will focus primarily on cold cases, i.e. unsolved murder cases and homicides from the past.