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As the season begins, we meet married, middle-aged, lead inspector Nina Rubin (Meret Becker) stumbling out of a disco for a violent quickie in an alley with a younger colleague. The next day at work, Inspector Robert Karow (Mark Waschke) shows up to join the homicide team and treats an earnest young intern in the meanest way possible. Hmm… not your mother’s Tatort. It’s Tatort: Streets of Berlin and you better put on your seatbelt for the edgiest title in the Tatort franchise yet. Karow and Rubin do have their professional strengths but they are also two alley cats. Which can be interesting for us domesticated to watch; alley cats have no loyalty, connected to no one.

But oy, these two. Previous Tatorts have played up the buddy aspect between the detectives. None of that here – Rubin and Karow are not friends. They do not like each other. They might appear to like each other in the clip below but trust me, it’s an unusual moment. In fact, Karow seems incapable of friendship and Nina vascilates between being attuned to others and self-absorption. While Karow remains a cypher, we do get to know Nina a little. She has her moments of humanity and she’s Jewish, at least culturally. (Of note is the fact that Berlin is home to a thriving Jewish population – over 45,000 people). When her son wants to be bar mitzvahed, she’s not impressed but goes along. As the season begins she is married to a Russian surgeon, also Jewish, and has two teenagers at home.

One has to admit, however – Rubin and Karow do solve the crimes. Karow has a photographic memory and Rubin possesses tenacity and instincts that even impress Karow. In this clip, Karow proposes they burgle someone’s home in search of evidence… a little shocking to Rubin initially. But, they’re not exactly a by-the-book pair.