MHz Choice has announced its programming slate for April 2023, which is headlined by the German crime comedy Homicide Hills.
In addition to Homicide Hills, April sees the return of fan-favorite series from Austria, Italy and Sweden, the SVOD launch of a classic British mystery series, and the premiere of a French mystery telefilm trilogy.
APRIL 4
Homicide Hills (Mord mit Aussicht) (Germany)
In this long-running German crime comedy series, Caroline Peters (Tatort, Wilsberg) stars as Detective Sophie Haas, a big-city cop who is “promoted” out of her role in Cologne and transferred to Hengasch, a (fictional) a rural town in the Eifel mountains. The police department here has two officers — Sergeant Dietmar Schäffer (Bjarne Mädel, Crime Scene Cleaner, Enemies) and Officer Barbel Schmied (Meike Droste, Tatort: Cologne, A Murder of Crows) — who have more time on their hands than cases to solve. Haas, disappointed at the lack of murders and open cases, aims to change this, opting to pursue every tiny lead for every small infraction while dragging her officers and occasionally the whole town along with her.
When for-real crimes and murders actually happen, this is when Haas is at her best — and her happiest! Her officers seem happier, too, since they can do some real police work, even if Haas has to show them how. Elsewhere in Hengasch, Dietmar’s wife Heike (Petra Kleinert, Tatort: Cologne), wears her jealousy on her gossipy sleeve, and Haas’s predecessor, Hans Zielonka (Michael Hanemann, Inspector Dupin), wishes he were still in charge.
APRIL 11
Agent Hamilton: Season 2 (Sweden)
Jakob Oftebro (Black Crab, Monster, 1864) returns as superspy Carl Hamilton in the second season of this spy thriller inspired by Jan Guillou‘s best-selling series of “Coq Rouge/Carl Hamilton” novels. It features four two-part stories that take Hamilton, a CIA- and Navy SEALs-trained Swedish operative, to different parts of Europe.
In the first story, Hamilton goes to the French Mediterranean to investigate the murder of a Swedish attack diver during a top-secret NATO operation in the Mediterranean. Hamilton’s next mission is in Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden, after a truck driver hauling mysterious cargo is stopped at a customs checkpoint on the Swedish-Finnish border and then killed in a shoot-out.
The third story sees Hamilton head to Belarus on a rescue mission after a Swedish-Chinese scientist is kidnapped for the weapons technology she invented, followed by the abduction of someone close to him. And in the final story, Hamilton is sent to Warsaw to protect a Swedish accountant, who’s been leaking information about the Polish oil company he works for, which leads to Hamilton discovering a conspiracy.
Maigret: Season 1 (UK)
This is the 1960s BBC series starring Ruper Davies. For details, read this article on The British TV Place.
APRIL 18
Imma Tataranni: Season 3 (Imma Tataranni sostituto procuratore) (Italy)
Based on the “Imma Tataranni” novels by Mariolina Venezia, this fan-favorite crime dramedy returns with a brand new season! Starring Vanessa Scalera (Anti-Mafia Squad) as the incorruptible and resourceful deputy prosecutor Immacolata “Imma” Tataranni, the eight new episodes will see Imma do what she does best: crack cases with attitude to spare in Matera, Italy. (Video is from Season 2)
APRIL 25
Inspector Rex: Season 4 (Kommissar Rex) (Austria-Germany)
This popular light police drama series, which has spawned Canadian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Slovak remakes, returns with another season that follows police dog Rex as he investigates crimes and solves mysteries with his human partner on the streets of Vienna. (Video is from Season 3)
Murderous Memories (France)
This trilogy of murder mystery telefilms, which mixes historical crimes with modern-day forensics, stars Gaëlle Bona (Mongeville, Murder in Rocamadour) and David Kammenos (Murder in Orleans, Braquo), along with Mhamed Arezki (Candice Renoir).
In “The Mists of Memory” (“Les brumes du souvenir“), the mayor of Bezonvaux, a ghost town in the heart of the Red Zone in Verdun, has been found murdered, his corpse amongst those that have been buried since the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Leading the investigation is Captain Clara Merisi (Gaëlle Bona) of the French judicial police in Nancy, who’s aided by her assistant, Guillaume Barot (Mhamed Arezki), the local gendarmerie, and François Gilbert (David Kammenos), a forensic anthropologist and historian who also serves as the medical examiner for the area. Interestingly, a few days earlier, François had found nearby the body of a woman who went missing thirty years ago. Could these cases be connected?
In “The Walls of Remembrance” (“Les murs du souvenir“), Clara Mérisi is called to the site of a building in Colmar, where renovations have unearthed the walled-up mummy of a man dressed in a Nazi uniform. François Gilbert confirms that the man had been murdered seventy years earlier, but how did the body get inside the building?
And in “The Waves of Memory” (“Les ondes du souvenir“), two boys exploring an abandoned steel factory outside the town of Longwy discover a corpse in a ventilation duct. The victim, who died forty years ago, is identified as a former steelworker, union activist, and volunteer for Lorraine Coeur d’acier, the pirate radio station set up in 1979 to fight against factory closures. But the case gets complicated for Clara, Guillaume, and Francois a few days later, when two other former steelworkers and members of the radio station are also assassinated.
All of these titles will stream in the US and Canada exclusively on MHz Choice and its digital channels, including MHz Choice on Amazon, starting on the dates shown above. (Note that scheduling changes can occur at any time and without prior notice.)
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