I have not owned a device capable of receiving German television in ten years, because I can’t bear to watch German television. The primary reason for that is that I just can’t watch dubbed stuff anymore. You’ll find a plethora of reasons for that on against-dubbing.com. So naturally, with the absence from German television, I really have no idea about what’s good in actual German-language productions. Good German films or TV shows are very rare anyway – the only two good German films I can think of are Knockin on Heaven’s Door and Das Leben der Anderen.

But as a TV show addict, I’m always open to new TV shows – especially ones that aren’t stereotypically American for a change. A couple of people mentioned Der Tatortreiniger (The Crime Scene Cleaner) as a rather good German TV show, so eventually I got around to checking it out on Netflix. Initially I was worried about two things: this show being too disgusting, and this show being too embarrassing (in the German sense of fremdschämen). Both worries were not exactly met – the show isn’t disgusting at all, at least compared to something like Game of Thrones or Hannibal. Usually, there’s only a puddle of blood, not much else. As for the Fremdschämfaktor, it is pretty average. There were only a few scenes that seemed really embarrassing, while the majority of each episode is usually much more philosophical.

This is actually quite surprising, as the main character, Schotti, is more of a lower class worker, cleaning crime scenes in and around Hamburg. The concept of the show revolves around Schotti arriving at a new crime scene in every episode, in which he is usually confronted with relatives, friends or acquaintances of the deceased – sometimes even their murderers. These confrontations range from hilarious to philosophical, sometimes all within the same 20 minutes.

For a German production, this show is surprisingly well done. It addresses quite a lot of interesting topics – lower class, upper class, education, even fascism. If your country’s Netflix has it, I can definitely recommend it, though of course I have no idea if the English translations are any good. Some of the German quotes have stuck with me, since they are just so universal – such as for example Schotti’s standard introduction: “Mein Job fängt da an wo andere sich vor entsetzten übergeben!”1.