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Siska - Der neue Mann
episode 1
Germany 1998
produced by Helmut Ringelmann, Claus Legal for Neue Münchner Fernsehproduktion/ZDF
directed by Hans-Jürgen Tögel
starring Peter Kremer, Werner Schnitzer, Matthias Freihof, Johanna Klante, Matthias Schweighöfer, Fabian Busch, Marc Rosenberg, Veit Stübner, Sabine Petzl, Michael Zittel, Alexander-Klaus Stecher, Hans Georg Panczak, Christian Koch, Randolf Kronberg, Holger Kriechel, Jeanne Dupuy, Michael Gahr, Gaby Herbst, Wulf Schmid Noerr, Inge Schulz
written by Herbert Reinecker, created by Herbert Reinecker, Helmut Ringelmann, music by Eberhard Schoener
TV-series Siska
review by Mike Haberfelner
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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,
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