Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned)   CLICK HERE to buy from Box set: episodes 1-12 German language only   CLICK HERE to buy from V.O.D. episodes 1-12 German language only Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!

After the murder of his wife (Sabine Petzl), inspector Siska (Peter Kremer) asks to be transferred to the Munich police, homicide division, where he's soon confronted with the case of a car and driver that seem to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Now what has really happened is a quartet of youngsters - Melitta (Johanna Klante), Benny (Matthias Schweighöfer), Urias (Fabian Busch) and Gerhard (Marc Rosenberg) - were stealing a car but got into a car chase with the car owners friend, whereupon their employer Weiding (Michael Zittel) and his right hand man Rotter (Veit Stübner) stepped in, lured the pursuer into an ambush and brutally killed him. Siska's colleagues Hahne (Werner Schnitzer) and Wiegand (Matthias Freihof) have since gotten their hands on Urias for questioning, but fail to get anywhere with him. Neither does Siska when he tries, really, but he manages to make the young man trust him. However, after Urias is released, he's beaten up by Weiding's men and then fired from the gang. Siska visits Urias that night, and now Urias is in a more talkative mood - only to commit suicide later that night. However, Siska now has a clue leading to Melitta, and it doesn't take him long to win her trust as well. However, Weiding uses her to lure Siska into the same ambush as their earlier victim, and it's only that Melitta's conscience gets the better of her that she warns Siska and ultimately helps him defeat Weiding and gang, just before reinforcements arrive ...

When popular crime series Derrick came to an end, producer Helmut Ringelmann and writer Herbert Reinecke - who have been a successful team since doing a handful of three-parters and ultimatel launching Der Kommissar in the late 1960s - didn't waste much time to look for a replacement, and ultimately this episode launching the new series Siska aired only two weeks after Derrick's last episode. Now the new series ran until 2008 and 91 episodes, and yet failed to be nearly as iconic as Ringelmann and Reinecke's earlier series, and this first episode already is a good indicator why: Basically it seems Reinecke's writing is a bit out of touch with the demands of its day's crime shows, his stilted dialogue doesn't really sit well with the series' hipness factor nor do his characters' often very weird actions and reactions - in other words, in the late 1990s, in a new series, his writing seemed to be somewhat antiquated. In a way, this has of course always been the case, but a mix of forgiving nostalgia and really familiarity with the style of both Der Kommissar and Derrick made his shortcomings as a writer into loveable quirks - but at the same time they seem terribly out of place in TV series of its day. And that this episode is also pagued by a lazy directorial effort and a rather uneven ensemble doesn't help much either,

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

Feeling lucky? Want to search any of my partnershops yourself for more, better results? (commissions earned)

The links below will take you just there!!!

Find Siska - Der neue Mann at the amazons ...   amazon.com   amazon.co.uk   amazon.de Looking for imports? Find Siska - Der neue Mann here ...   eThaiCD.com Your shop for all things Thai Something naughty? (Must be over 18 to go there!)   find Siska - Der neue Mann at adultvideouniverse.com

Thanks for watching !!!