Vienna Blood 1-2: Demons in the Architecture

Took a few minutes (actually closer to 90) out of everything else to watch the first two episodes (actually, one episode, broken into two parts) of Vienna Blood on PBS (my wife aptly flagged it).
It's an excellent historical detective drama, set in 1906 Vienna, with the likes of Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler making cameo appearances, and astute historical details (we see a disk not a cylinder on the phonograph - the disk, invented by Berliner, would indeed have been playing there and then, not Edison's cylinder, invented, earlier, in the US).

Max Liebermann is a young psychologist in the even younger field of Freudian psychology. Oskar Reinhardt is a detective with a difficult even harrowing personal story (his daughter died and his wife left him).  Their superiors in one way or another are all calcified idiots.  The two make an outstanding team.

Other important aspects of the milieu include anti-semitism - Max and his family are Jewish - and a city which, at this time, was one of the most impressive cultural capitals in the world.  Art, music, and angels in the architexture (to quote Paul Simon) are very much at hand.  But this world also contains demons in the form of human murderers, and that's what this little series is all about:  how an early profiler and a more seasoned lawman can solve crimes and bring the bad guy to justice.

Give that this is a mystery, I won't say anything more about the plot.  I will say that it was well developed and resolved.   I did wonder about a few missing historical details - I didn't spot any automobiles or telephones.   There had to be a least a few of them in 1906 Vienna.  But there was a mention of Jung's "shadow self," which tracks perfectly with history, since Jung sent his Studies in Word Association to Freud in Vienna in 1906.

I'll try to be back here in two weeks with a single review of the next two-part episode.




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