Der Tatortreiniger

NDR's Der Tatortreiniger launched in 2011 and ran for seven seasons across thirty-one half-hour episodes through 2018. The series was created and almost entirely written by the German theatre director and playwright Mizzi Meyer (the pen name of Ingrid Lausund), whose stage work had developed the dialogue-driven two-hander register the show would extend into half-hour television form.

The cast is led by Bjarne Mädel as Schotty, the crime-scene cleaner whose flat affect and willingness to listen draw out the various interlocutors who appear in each self-contained episode. Mädel — a graduate of the Schauspiel Hannover theatre tradition — was already a regular ensemble face in German television (Stromberg, Mord mit Aussicht) but the role here cemented his profile as one of the country's most distinctive comic-dramatic leads. Major guest performers across the run include Charly Hübner, Devid Striesow, Annika Kuhl and Marc Hosemann.

The series won six Grimme-Preis awards across its run — the most-decorated German television show of its era at the prize — plus multiple German Comedy Awards and Bavarian TV Awards. It is regularly cited in academic studies of contemporary German television as a model of the small-cast dialogue-driven format, and as part of the larger 2010s NDR/Arte/ZDF revival of public-broadcast scripted comedy.