PBS
Welcome back, possibly for the last time, to Vienna Blood. If this season finale pulls double-duty as a series finale, it will complete a nice little set of bookends for our favorite intercultural, pre-Great War crime-fighting odd couple (while leaving the door tantalizingly open for several more chapters of The
PBS
This week on Vienna Blood, we get many illustrative examples that just because someone is paranoid doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Poor Oskar; it’s not enough that Max will be damn lucky to survive surgery following last week’s shooting. Nor is it enough for Oskar to torture
PBS
Longtime Vienna Blood viewers will recall that PBS tends to split each season’s feature-length episodes, giving the show a longer run. This time around, those breaks – which have in the past tended strongly towards the clunky – work pretty well. The break between “Mephisto Waltz” and “A Winning Hand” is
PBS
Vienna Blood is back for one more waltz! The British-Austrian production is unlike most English-language shows on PBS’s slate, thanks to its setting in mainland Europe between the Victorian and Great War periods. In some respects, it’s a classic odd couple-solves-murders show featuring an energetic, overly self-assured guy
PBS
In anticipation of Vienna Blood’s fourth (and likely final, though I have thoughts about that) season arriving on PBS on January 5, it’s a good moment to revisit highlights of the previous three seasons of this often-delightful odd couple solving murders in the waning days of the Austria-Hungarian
Mystery
As is true of nearly all successful murder mysteries based on books (unless you're adapting Agatha Christie), eventually, the source material runs out. It's a mark of the popularity of Vienna Blood that it hit this point and the production's dedication to the Frank
PBS
Vienna Blood's cold open chyron "China 1900" presents the Boxer Rebellion; in a lesser series, it might herald a yellow peril episode. However, the second chyron reminds us how far the series still has to go. "Vienna 1908" was Season 1's setting;
Mystery
As viewers may remember last time Vienna Blood was on the air, Season 2 left things on a cliffhanger. However, it's been a year since then, both in our time and theirs. Since viewers were last in Edwardian Vienna, Max has written a best seller on the subject
Mystery
Vienna Blood didn't premiere at the most auspicious time, arriving in January 2020 just ahead of the pandemic shutdown and with a lead-in of Masterpiece's first season of Sanditon, which was already canceled before it arrived. With Austria (where the show is filmed) in lockdown, it
Mystery
Vienna Blood has leaned heavily into the Liebermans' Jewishness, so opening with Catholic iconography and Gregorian chant is a choice. It's due to a lecture organized by Herr Strobl (Serge Falck), and Professor Priel (David Oberkogler) attended by Mendel, Max, and Amelia, featuring Brother Stanislav (Lukas Watzl)
Mystery
Vienna Blood is set in Vienna in the Edwardian era, but Victorian-style street urchins are universal in mysteries. The episode starts with one who stole a watch (Dajana Rajic). She leads the police on a merry chase through Landstrasse, ending with finding a dismembered body, missing a hand. Reinhardt is
Mystery
In Season 1, Vienna Blood was interesting in its usual setting and some of its characters, but its mysteries were frequently too simple. Making the lead detective an early Freud student leaned into "these aspects of mental health are so new" allowed audiences to feel more competent than