Tatort as After-School Special

There's an English phrase that always comes to my mind when I watch a particularly preachy episode of Tatort ("crime scene"), the weekly crime show that is a German institution. The phrase is "after-school special". An after-school special, was a TV show, usually a drama, that played at 4 pm or so, just as kids would come home from school. The scripts taught us kids to to tolerate all races; be proud of who we were; accept people who are different; be kind to the handicapped; avoid drugs, smoking, alcohol, and sex; not let strangers touch us "there"; and so on. The clip above gives you an idea of what we're dealing with (and, as an extra bonus, it features the title "The Boy who Drank Too Much"!).*

German publicly-financed television has a so-called Bildungsauftrag, roughly, "duty to educate". Now there's nothing wrong with requiring broadcasters who are financed by TV fees to provide educational programming. The talk shows and documentaries you see on regular German television -- as much as we might mock them -- are streets ahead of anything on American TV. The show Titel Thesen Temperamente (g) which runs every Sunday on the main German broadcast station, shows a fantastic dog's breakfast of 8-10 minute long clips about everything from jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani to discrimination against homosexuals in Turkey to Tiken Jah Fakoly (including a tour of his home and studio in Bamako, Mali), to anti-right-wing activists to Werner Herzog's new films to the Nazi past of the Alpine climbing group. Just about every one of these segments would have been deemed too controversial/hifalutin/boring/full of non-Americans for any of the 500 channels of American television. Except the stuff about Nazis, of course. Nazis always sell.

The problem is that this duty to educate often seeps into the dramas. Tatort, nominally a crime thriller, often reeks of after-school special. Frank Junghänel provides an example (g) in the Frankfurter Rundschau (my translation):

The problem is often the stories...they always have to be relevant. If there's a case from the 'beekeeper milieu', we're guaranteed to find out that the bees ate some genetically-modified rapeseed. Then the detectives will spontaneously discuss the dangers of adulterated honey, [Detective] Freddy Schenk will wring his hands over his granddaughter's future, and, at the end, the pharmaceutical industry will be outed as the villain, having sponsored experiments with rapeseed...

These after-school-special theme episodes are rarely highlights. But Tatort produders want to remain true to their mission to educate the public. "I'm trying to motivate the screenwriters to be more flexible with their narrative structures", says Tönsmann. "The theme should develop from the story, not be imposed beforehand." Screenwriters tend to want to explain too much. "We want to reduce the didactic element." At home, he likes to watch DVD series such as "The Wire." It plays in Baltimore, and shows police mostly at work.

The article goes through an entire laundry list of weaknesses in Tatort scripts: the sensitive would-be literati who write them have no idea about real police work, the situations are often ludicrously exaggerated, the characters make implausibly long and well-organized speeches, didacticism makes things boring and predictable, the same targets get whacked again and again. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the after-school special in the USA was designed for teenagers, while Tatort, broadcast on Sunday night, is watched (mostly) by adults.

Which leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that the people who write for German public TV stations think of their audience as largish children still in need of moral instruction. According to Tatort, adult Germans need to be taught that neo-fascists are bad, asylum seekers/transvestites/nonconformist teenagers are misunderstood and unjustly persecuted, corporations (especially pharmaceutical and agricultural corporations) are evil, sexual abuse destroys lives, yet even pedophiles deserve a second chance, vengeance is always an wrong, Eastern European crime gangs and their rich German customers exploit women, your cheap clothes come from stinking sweatshops, etc.*

As Junghänel's article shows, there are some producers and writers for Tatort who are aware of the after-school special problem. The mention of The Wire is promising: High-end American TV has recently gotten very good indeed at Balzacian realism, and The Wire is among the best shows ever made. It's based on careful observation of reality, and its writers generally let the chips fall where they may: if a scene was logical and right, it got shot, regardless of whether it might have happened to confound or confirm a stereotype.

An example: one character, Kima Greggs, is a detective who -- even though she's a a gay black woman -- is not shown to be unusually noble, self-sacrificing, or wise. She's out on patrol when a bunch of mostly-white officers are arresting some black men, and one of them turns around and assaults a cop. Big mistake. A cluster of uniforms surrounds the hapless arrestee, beating the living crap out of him. Greggs runs over to the scene. Does she deliver a lecture on racial tolerance or police brutality to the beefy white cops? No, she joins in -- because a good cop always protects fellow officers, and that includes making sure anybody who attacks a cop lives to regret it. And of course there's no disciplinary proceeding, because (a) the guy really was resisting arrest, and (b) nobody's going to snitch. This would be the point at which a robot programmed with politically-correct Tatort episodes would begin shrieking "does not compute" and finally explode in a shower of sparks. Good riddance.

* Now, just to clear the air: I agree with most of these messages. We should be nice to other people! Kids should steer clear of drugs and alcohol! Neo-nazis are bad! Etc. etc. My issue is with crappy dramas caused by political stances, not political stances as such.

Comments

[Mison]

I agree with your definition of the problems the show has. You forgot the most evil group: Secret services and federal police. As soon as somebody from the Bundeskriminalamt, the Verfassungsschutz or worst of all the Bundesnachrichtendienst appears, you know that they are covering some agent who went rogue and is now killing/selling drugs/founding nazi parties etc. The Tatort most affected by this crap is probably the one in Bremen.
However: I enjoy most of the Tatort episodes as some slightly funny get-together with television characters you've known for some time. Maybe more like a Telenovela.
My favourites: Wien (great cops, who usually stumble through the episode while the crime solves itself), Münster (does not even try to be realistic, but is funny), Frankfurt, Wiesbaden (only one, slightly too experimental, episode so far), Hamburg (Sibel Kekilli, yeah!)

And as Sebastian pointed out: There are enough other crime shows in German and American TV which transport a purely reactonist world-view.

[Sebastian]

in the time it took you to write this blog post, you could have watched an entire episode of Alarm für Cobra 11. Seriously, there are lots of crime shows on German TV. Everytime someone complains about the flaws of Tatort, what I'm hearing is: "There must not be a single show like Tatort on TV."

(I'm not saying nobody should criticise anything, but those complaints are always pretty much the same and concern the core concept of the show. What people like Andrew want is that a completely different show be aired every Sunday on 20:15.)

[Curtis]

The talk shows and documentaries you see on regular German television -- as much as we might mock them -- are streets ahead of anything on American TV. The show Titel Thesen Temperamente which runs every Sunday on the main German broadcast station, shows a fantastic dog's breakfast of 8-10 minute long clips about everything from jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani to discrimination against homosexuals in Turkey to Tiken Jah Fakoly (including a tour of his home and studio in Bamako, Mali), to anti-right-wing activists to Werner Herzog's new films to the Nazi past of the Alpine climbing group. Just about every one of these segments would have been deemed too controversial/hifalutin/boring/full of non-Americans for any of the 500 channels of American television. Except the stuff about Nazis, of course. Nazis always sell.

Well, that's an unfair depiction of American television, isn't it? I think you're forgetting that each state has their own system of public educational television stations. Then there's the public TV station par excellence PBS which has a "mandate" to show:

Fine Arts (e.g. Great Performances, Live from Lincoln Center)
Drama (e.g. American Playhouse, Masterpiece Theater)
Science (e.g. Nova, Scientific American)
History (e.g. American Experience, various documentaries)
Public Affairs and Political Talk Shows(e.g. Frontline, Wide Angle, PBS NewsHour)
Independent Films (e.g. P.O.V., Independent Lens)

PBS has been showing high quality programming without financing from advertisers for over 40 years now. Remember Sesame Street, Andrew? Right! Another PBS program!

[MM]

This moralizing tone on German TV has irritated me for as long as I remember. I wonder sometimes if it comes from Schiller's idea of theatre as a moralische Anstalt.

[Andrew]

@Michael: I didn't see the last Tatort, but I fully agree that some of them are actually quite interesting and plausible. When Tatort is good, it can be really fine.

@Schorsch: You're welcome! I've been meaning to check out Angesicht des Verbrechens (it's playing on Arte now), but haven't had the time. Thanks for the tip.

[Schorsch]

Thank you, thank you, and thank you again!
It seems the Tatort writers are beseeched by the fear that the audience will not get it, so they always end up trying to hard making the whole show extremely "überzeichnet".
There was a pretty good show on ARD called "im Angesicht des Verbrechens". While it was no "the Wire" it did attempt to show the lives of "real people" with all their ambiguities and contradictions instead of the Tatort black and white crap. And before anyone jumps at me, I will agree that there were some good Schimanski shows.

[michael]

Did you see the last (Frankfurt) Tatort? I thought it for once worked pretty well as a drama, but maybe I'm jaded from watching too much Tatort. It had its After School Special moments but nothing too drastic. (Minor spoiler: It's about German and Polish soldiers smuggling drugs from Afgahnistan and about revenge.)

I'm asking because you are writing this article only a few days after this new Tatort aired and it didn't seem particularly preachy.

Overall your observation is of course apt.