This Viennese crime scene is, on the one hand, very ambitious. The story is told, so to speak, by the investigator Meret Shame, who tells her psychologist – and thus also the audience – how everything happened. The fact that the young woman is with the psychologist already indicates that she is directly involved in what is happening, and in the showdown she is even the center of attention. Meret Shame (Christina Scherrer) is the still quite new assistant to the Viennese audience favorites Moritz Eisner (Harald Krassnitzer) and Bibi Fellner (Adele Neuhauser), you really get to know her in this case, her face fills the entire screen several times. And sometimes when she speaks to her therapist, it feels like she’s breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the TV audience. an in crime scene stylistic device used only in very measured doses, aficionados may remember similar sequences in the episodes “Born in Pain” or “A Quite Normal Murder”.
Meret Shame (Christina Scherrer, center) is the secret narrator of this “crime scene”.
(Photo: Petro Domenigg/ARD Degeto/ORF/Prisma Film)
On the other hand, the content of the episode “What is that for a world” (directed by Evi Romen, book by Thomas Weingartner and Stefan Hafner) is not as ambitious as the narrative structure and many other directorial ideas promise. A young IT employee who worked in a company that aims to optimize work processes and thus replace people with computers has been stabbed to death. This kind of rationalization has the pleasant effect for detective stories that among the workers who have become superfluous there are always some who would be ready at any time to commit acts of violence out of revenge. Here you can see, for example, employees of a farm, to whom a somewhat exaggerated software optimizer explains how they “get the milk from the udder into the packaging as quickly as possible” and that this requires “packing optimization” and “consumer communication”. The cows moo skeptically in the background, they have no concept of “knowledge drain”. Now you have that in crime scene often seen: that old, brave working people are plundered by young, unscrupulous job killers who live in apartments that look like something out of the catalog for job killer apartments, expensive, uncomfortable, glassy.
This crime scene Lives, like many episodes from Vienna, from the charm and warmth of the investigators Eisner and Fellner, who once – it’s almost a shock – seem to agree to a rendezvous. From the Austrian vocal sound, which (“Where I come from, you don’t let your head be shitted on”) is a gift for the atmosphere of every crime novel. From the actors: all well-known or lesser-known character heads, some with interesting hairstyles. Christina Scherrer as Meret Schande also plays her role, which is so important this time, convincingly, but she can’t hide the fact that the story itself is only moderately original.
The first, Sunday, 8:15 p.m.
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