Meet the latest additions to MHz Choice’s ever-growing roster of investigators from the iconic Tatort crime franchise!

Tatort: Dortmund (Beta Film) introduces an idiosyncratic new investigative team led by the haunted, driven detective Peter Faber. Faber is played by Jörg Hartmann, an actor best-known to MHz Choice subscribers as Uwe Kockisch’s eldest son Falk Kupfer in the über-popular Cold War drama The Weissensee Saga. A man with a tragic past who fights an ongoing battle with depression, Faber is an irritatingly unpredictable colleague, but a brilliant detective nonetheless. “He is not someone the audience immediately likes,” is how Hartmann has described his character.
“Not a bad guy, but an awkward guy.” In time, Peter Faber has gained a controversial cult status among German viewers, putting him up there with fellow long-running Tatort leads Klaus Borowski and Horst Schimanski.

Faber’s team includes Martina Bönisch, a wife and mother of two sons. Her marriage is a struggle, but she tries her best to make it work for the sake of her family. On duty, she is a reliable, compassionate officer who doesn’t shy away from breaking the rules when the situation calls for it. Bönisch is played by veteran German actor Anna Schudt, best-known to MHz Choice subscribers for her role in Algiers Confidential.

The team is rounded out by two younger leads. Nora Dalay (Aylin Tezel, Reformation) is half-German, half-Turkish and has spent most of her life caught between the two cultures. Now she prioritizes her career above everything else, but her personal life will complicate matters as she has embarked on a relationship with her colleague Daniel Kossik (Stefan Konarske, Das Boot), a straight-talking Dortmund native who worked his way up from patrol officer to the homicide squad. Nora and Daniel’s romance is one example of Dortmund’s horizontal narrative style, with individual story and character arcs extending over multiple episodes – something that sets it apart from other Tatort series.

After Essen (Inspector Haferkamp, 1974-80) and Duisburg (Horst Schimanski, 1981-91), Dortmund is the third city in the Ruhr region to feature in a Tatort series. More on Schimanski later this year…