Matthew Beard’s Max Liebermann, a fastidious English disciple of Freud, teams with Juergen Maurer’s gruff Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt in 1900s Vienna, where each three-part case begins with a corpse in a chocolate-box setting: an opera box, a Ferris wheel car, the Hofburg’s chapel floorboards. While Rheinhardt chases witnesses through coffee houses, Liebermann unpicks dreams and repressed desires, the scripts folding early psychoanalysis into plots that climax on ballroom floors or the Prater’s ghost rides.
The BBC–ORF co-production films on location around the Ringstrasse, letting cinematographer Andreas Thalhammer linger on gilt mirrors and gas-lit snow while composer Roman Kariolou threads Mahler-style strings through the score. Interiors were shot at Rosenhügel and Schönbrunn, with the production design squeezing Jewish family life into high-ceilinged apartments whose menorahs sit beside Secessionist posters.
Four seasons have aired since 2019, adapting four of Frank Tallis’s Liebermann novels; Tallis has since suggested the TV version could outrun his books. Viewers in the UK and Austria receive three 90-minute films per run, whereas the US cut splits each case into two 45-minute halves, doubling the episode count without adding footage. A fifth commission remains undecided, leaving Liebermann’s last glance into the Danube as either a full stop or a cliffhanger.
Production Details
ZDF / 4 Seasons / 11 Episodes / 2019 - Present
Created by: Steve Thompson
Showrunner(s): Steve Thompson
Writer(s): Steve Thompson, Steven Thompson
Producer(s): Steve Thompson Oliver Auspitz Andreas Kamm Jez Swimer
Main Cast
Matthew Beard as Max Liebermann
Juergen Maurer as Oskar Rheinhardt
Charlene McKenna as Leah Liebermann
Conleth Hill as Mendel Liebermann
Amelia Bullmore as Rachel Liebermann
Josef Ellers as Sergeant Haussmann
Simon Hatzl as Police Commissioner Strasser
Jessica De Gouw as Amelia Lydgate
Miriam Hie as Polizeiarchivarin Therese Lindner
Luise von Finckh as Clara Weiss
Raphael von Bargen as Inspector von Bülow
Harald Windisch as Professor Matthias
