'Vienna Blood' Sets Date for Final Season on PBS

When Vienna Blood initially debuted in January 2020 in the post-Sanditon slot, it was an awkward fit, to say the least. Not only did the heavily masculine Mystery of the Week series not fit tonally with Andrew Davies' Jane Austen fanfic, created from her final, unfinished novel, but it was also struggling to figure out what kind of show it wanted to be. The cast was brilliant, the chemistry super (save for one pairing), and the story of Max Liebermann (Matthew Beard), a middle-class Jewish psychoanalyst Freud disciple teaming up with Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt (Juergen Maurer), a working-class Austrian inspector, a new angle on the Victorian-era crime show. However, the stories clearly wanted it to be "just the facts of the case, ma'am." At the same time, the characters (and the actors) were far more suited to a cozy crime show where solving mysteries happens to be what people do for a living in between their delightful family dynamics.

Throughout the next two seasons, Vienna Blood slowly found its way out of the problems of the first. The supposed "love triangle" between Max, his one-time fiancee Clara (Luise von Finckh), and nerdy historian scientist Amelia Lydgate (first played by Jessica De Gouw, who had negative chemistry with Beard and then replaced with Lucy Griffiths, who merely had zero chemistry with him) was finally ditched, Clara was turned into a "plucky reporter," and Max's "one who got away," and the entire Liebermann family took their tight-knit bond and started helping Max solve crimes too.

It's almost a shame that the series is ending now that it finally figured out its formula, but the series, based on Frank Tallis's books, basically ran out of source material halfway through Season 3. Season 4 will, therefore, wrap everything up with one wholly original season-long mystery called "Mephisto Waltz."