Today’s Kurier is reminding me that the only TV series I ever planned my life around, “Kommissar Rex”, is celebrating this year the 30th anniversary of its debut.
It seemed such a natural hit (Rex, Tobias Moretti, and Vienna) that I was surprised to read that the writer, Peter Hajek, tried for ages to get someone interested. Even when he found a director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, who had just won a prestigious prize for another crime show, it didn’t get much easier. Finally, a private network, SAT1, took it on. To think we might never have had it at all!
It was a show that not only appealed to the Viennese. It was shown in 120 countries around the world and inspired a Canadian version, “Hudson & Rex”.
And it gave work to some young actors who went on to international fame, notably Karl Markovics, who played the main role in “The Counterfeiters”, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2008, and Christoph Waltz, who, with two Oscars for Best Supporting Actor, is practically a fixture in Hollywood at this point. He got a good start playing very sinister characters on Kommissar Rex when he played a doll maker who liked to dress women up as dolls, photograph them, and then murder them.
The episode that has stayed with me the longest was one in which someone was killing off little old Viennese ladies to get their hands on the apartments, leased until death at very low rents. (I would say “rent-controlled” but I think the system in New York, for example, is a little different from here.) That seemed quite realistic to me, and perhaps a bit worrying as I am now getting older, living in just such a flat (although without quite so low a rent).
Thirty years. That takes me back.
ecbinvienna 