Time to bust out the region-free DVD player?

Today's Times has an article about Tatort, a German TV police procedural that will soon celebrate its 40th year on the air:

“Tatort” is a little akin to what Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” was in America. It’s one of those modest pop-culture symbols and long-standing common experiences that can be hard for outsiders to translate but that speak to, and of, a nation. First broadcast in 1970, before video games or food processors and when Germany seemed permanently split in two, the show adopted the