Dark, intricate, and intense, this weekend’s pick for Euro TV watching is Blochin, a crime drama miniseries from Germany.
A few months after Blochin (Blochin: Die Lebenden und die Toten – Blochin: The Living and the Dead) had its international premiere at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival, Goethe-Institut screened it in the US as part of a film and TV event series at its local offices across the United States. After watching it (and liking it), I hoped a stateside channel or streaming service would pick it up. And one did.
The miniseries stars Jürgen Vogel (Tatort, Shades of Guilt, Hotel Adlon) as the eponymous cop with a made-up identity and a criminal history. Blochin isn’t in a witness protection program. Rather, he was shot when he was fourteen and woke up in the morgue with no memory of what had happened or who he was. So he took the name of a footballer.
And he gave up crime and became a cop. Only certain criminals won’t let him go.
The murder of a drug dealer known to Blochin should have been a standard investigation for Blochin and Lt. Dominik Stötzner (Thomas Heinze, Tatort, Marie’s Mind for Murder), his boss in Homicide Division 7 of the Berlin Police and his brother-in-law. But for some reason the Feds take over the homicide case, prompting Blochin to conduct an unofficial investigation with Stötzner’s help.
In so doing, Blochin’s past comes back to haunt him, Stötzner’s cover-up for Blochin has unexpected consequences, and the chain of events that follows threatens the careers and lives of both men — entangling them in a web that involves menacing figures from Berlin’s organized crime underworld and senior members of Berlin politics, including Katrin Steinbrenner (Jördis Triebel, Dark, Babylon Berlin), the Interior Ministry’s State Secretary and Stötzner’s married lover.
Meanwhile, Inka (Maja Schöne, Dark), Blochin’s wife and Stötzner’s sister, is getting sicker from multiple sclerosis and becoming less able to care for herself or daughter Grille.
The five-part drama features Godehard Giese (The Same Sky), Jörg Pose (Crime Scene Cleaner), Emilia Eidt (Das weiße Kaninchen), Carol Schuler (The Undertaker), and Jule Böwe (Blackout – Die Erinnerung ist tödlich).
Created and directed by multiple-award winner Matthias Glasner (The Free Will), Blochin is currently streaming in the US on MHz Choice and the MHz Choice channel on Amazon.
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