Premiering July 25, 2023

Originally premiering on Austrian TV in 1994, Inspector Rex (Beta Films) was an uber-popular international hit featuring the exploits of German Shepherd police dog Rex, his partners and the rest of the gang at the Vienna Criminal Police as they work together to solve often surprisingly hard-hitting crimes in the historic and picturesque Austrian capital.

And what a season this is! For the first time in a while, there are no major cast changes so the focus is on the core team: Rex, Alex Brandtner (Gedeon Burkhard), Christian Böck (Heinz Weixelbraun) and Fritz Kunz (Martin Weinek) – and the city of Vienna itself. We start the season with a dark plot set in the famous catacombs of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and later on we take a night-time ride on the Riesenrad Ferris wheel (made famous in director Carol Reed’s 1949 classic The Third Man) at the Prater amusement park in Leopoldstadt – as seen in the series’ opening title sequence throughout its run. In between, there is action featuring not only planes, trains and automobiles but also speedboats and, in one particularly exhilarating episode, a scene inspired by the 1994 Keanu Reeves actioner Speed (with maybe a little of Jackie Chan’s 1985 Police Story thrown in) in which Rex must rescue passengers from a hijacked bus hurtling through downtown Vienna. Woof!