("Crime Scene") is a German-language police procedural television series that has been running continuously since 1970 with some 30 feature-length episodes per year, which makes it the longest-running German TV drama. Developed by the German public-service broadcasting organization ARD for their channel Das Erste, it is unique in its approach in that it is jointly produced by all of the organization's regional members as well as its partnering Austrian and Swiss national public-service broadcasters, whereby every regional station contributes several episodes to a common pool.
Therefore, the series is a collection of different police stories where other police teams solve crimes in their city. Uniqueness in architecture, customs, and dialects of the cities is, therefore a distinctive part of the series. Often, the city, not the police force, is the real main character of an episode. The concept of local stations only producing a couple of shows per year has also enabled the shows to be longer (90 minutes) and more fleshed out psychologically than other weekly TV dramas.
The first episode was broadcast on 29 November 1970. Episodes are broadcast on ARD's main channel Das Erste on Sunday evening at the prime viewing time of 8:15 pm (just after the 8 pm Tagesschau news) around three times a month. Reruns are often shown by various regional ARD stations and on foreign broadcasters. Alongside the member stations of the ARD, the national Austrian broadcasting corporation Österreichischer Rundfunk joined the production pool in 1971 and airs the program on its ORF 2 channel. Switzerland's Schweizer Fernsehen joined the collection from 1990 to 2001 and again in 2011 and distributes its episodes through its channel SRF 1 and Play SRF streaming app.
The series Polizeiruf 110, which was produced by East Germany's state TV broadcaster as a counterpart to the West German and has a similar regional production approach, is still produced by ARD's regional broadcasters Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR), Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB), Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) and Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR). Polizeiruf 110 shares the Sunday night prime time slot on Das Erste with .
Concept
The main feature of is that all participating regional TV stations jointly produce it. Each of the eleven companies involved (the nine German regional TV channels or Landesrundfunkanstalten that together form ARD, plus ORF in Austria and SRF in Switzerland), produces its episodes. Each station usually features more than one team of inspectors in different cities in its region, depending on the size of the producing broadcaster. Each of the roughly 20 active teams appears one to two times each year. Nearly every Sunday, a new episode from a different city premieres on Das Erste; old episodes are often shown through all participating stations as part of their standard programming. The series shares this concept with its former East German counterpart Polizeiruf 110, which is produced as four additional investigator teams aired under a different series name and opening credits by some regional broadcasters, primarily those which evolved from East German state television.
Every episode features a different team of inspectors in another city. Combined with the fact that the attacks are 90 minutes long, almost movie-length, and rarely more than 30 episodes in one year, this makes for a cultural phenomenon closer to a string of made-for-TV movies than a typical police series.
This pooling concept was mainly due to the nature of the public broadcast television channel ARD, which is jointly operated by all of Germany's regional public Landesrundfunkanstalten. The 9 regional public broadcasters collect broadcasting fees in their region of Germany (each region comprising one or more federal states), each with multiple radio stations and a regional TV station. Das Erste is produced as a joint national channel with standard national programming. Each regional broadcaster is responsible for parts of the programming, unlike in the US with its network affiliate system. Usually, one to three broadcasters produce one TV programme in cooperation. When was developed as a series of weekly feature film-long local crime stories, the stated concept was used to distribute financial and organizational efforts.