Along with Derrick, this long-running series about a Munich murder division encapsulates one generation of German police series. Each nation with a tradition of police television shows usually develops that tradition to reflect its cultural character. For example, the overriding concern for American cop shows tends to be fast-paced individual action or, in the likes C.S.I., the celebration of crime-solving technology - reflecting the traditional American faith in the hard-fisted individual and infallible technology. The British have traditionally had their aristocratic detectives driving Jagges to mansions of nobility to uncover the evil that lurks behind the parapets of Ye Olde Englande, or their more urban colleagues wade through the debris in the darkest underbelly of class-bound society, solving their cases more through insight, empathy or sheer luck than by running around with guns blazing.
Similarly, Der Alte's brand of Krimis seem to be almost a caricature of post-war (West) Germany, as theirs is a materially affluent and seemingly well-regulated bourgeoisie world secretly racked by barely submerged passions and aggression. The setting of the murder is urban and seemingly realistic, yet most of the time luxuriously upper middle class and cut off from the rest of the society. The murders are often crimes of passion, mindless accidental slayings and irrational outbursts against the intrusion of the have-nots into the falsely respectable little bubbles of the haves. There are no good fights against master criminals or great evils to punish, only human foibles, misery and stupidity to sort out. Apart from the murder, there is rarely much violence and very little action in the American sense.
The role of the civil-servant like policemen is like that of an observer and catalyst in the inexorable process of "murder will out": they are the establishment, there to see, to ask the right questions and declare the arrest with dispassionate authority – after which the credits immediately roll. Unlike Derrick, Der Alte does not dwell extensively in metaphysical musings about right and wrong, yet its coppers do not get their man through elaborate forensic, logical or physical effort, but psychological understanding, simple empathy to people's basic drives and a lot of inglorious legwork. The fact that we rarely see them off duty amplifies the competent and matter-of-fact quality of the series.
The series is also highly formalistic, even mechanical, working to and rarely deviating from the pattern it set up early on after its uncharacteristically gritty pilot episode, with same competence and slightly reserved professionalism as its protagonists. Even the guest cast is drawn from a rather shallow pool of talent, so some actors have appeared in up to dozen different roles over the years (not to mention in similar roles in other series), leading to some typecasting and sense of déjà vu. In fact you can only tell the passage of time from fashion, the occasional pop songs on the soundtrack and the gradual phasing out of clunky Ladas and clunkier car-phones in favour of Mercedeses and mobiles.
Set pieces may stay, but the main characters do not. Only Michael Ande's permanently boyish-looking Gerd Heymann has remained a constant fixture. Even the "old man" himself, Lowitz's shabbily jovial Inspector Erwin Köster was killed in what has to be one of the most anti-climacticly downbeat death-by-shootings in the history of television drama and replaced by Shimpf's matter-of-fact Leo Kress. Twenty years later he too was superseded by Kreye's rather bland Rolf Herzog. The series did set a precedent with Huber's Henry Johnson, who was apparently the first non-white copper to make it to the regular cast in a television Krimi. While none of the characters are great personalities, their professional Kameraderie and understated joviality of their interactions help to humanise each episode.
Now an anachronism compared with the tougher Krimis of the last thirty years, Der Alte has still served well for three decades as a safe alternative to the Anglo-American mainstream of police shows. Its grey professionalism assures the audience that though the country around them may change, the only chinks in the smooth-running social machinery are minor upsurges of irrational individual drama that are safely and discreetly handled by a few benevolent and unremarkable policemen.
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