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The glorious three: Police officer Bärbel Schmied (Meike Droste), colleague Dietmar Schäffer (Bjarne Mädel) and inspector Sophie Haas (Caroline Peters) (from left to right)
Photo: Michael Böhme / WDR
The Eifel is a sparsely populated slate mountain range in western Germany, not far from Cologne.
Before Hollywood retired the fairytale characters of its forests, rivers and lakes, it was populated by giants and elves, werewolves and dwarves, but now there is no longer any reason to fear.
In the Eifel, too, the streets are illuminated and life is neatly arranged.
When a manure truck drives through the village and loses a small amount of its load, the local police forcefully urge the driver to remove his dirt immediately.
You not only know the driver, but probably also his dog personally.
Icon: enlarge Photo: Michael Böhme / WDR
For Commissioner Sophie Haas, transferred here from Cologne, it is "Taka-Tuka-Land".
Not even an hour's drive from their beloved urban home, but all in all the dreary opposite.
Haas is passionate about the abyss of humanity, including drug trafficking, kidnapping, and the use of firearms.
Fellow citizens who decorate their apartment with salted pastries give her a riddle that she does not want to solve.
Alien worlds that collide
The series came to a much weeping end in 2015 after three seasons with a half-successful 90-minute graduation film.
Even in countless repetitions, she still achieves the best rates.
ARD is now continuing it, but with new staff: Katharina Wackernagel, Sebastian Schwarz and Eva Bühnen form the new police team in the Eifel.
The basic idea will probably remain the same: foreign worlds that collide - explosive in real life as in art.
The rich man who has to be helped into a wheelchair by a poor man ("Pretty Best Friends"), the millionaire family who is dependent on a clan from the precariat ("Parasite") - that is the best dramatic material.
It becomes a comedy when the circumstances are harmless.
And a festival of irony when both sides are actually not interested in each other.
That is the situation in which Caroline Peters, as an adrenaline-addicted, self-confident inspector, encounters her subordinates, the honest police officer Dietmar Schaeffer (Bjarne Mädel) and his competent colleague Bärbel Schmied (Meike Droste): You don't want to know anything about each other.
Sophie Haas' red cabriolet, the urban chic of her clothes, her carefully guarded private life are all good for a little excitement at the station.
Basically, however, the provincial staff, with sedate innocence, is convinced that their way of life is the only correct one and that their operating temperature is appropriate for the environment.
New methods, distrust of people you've known for ages, digging up old stories, what for?
If a murder really happens, it was definitely "someone from outside."
Meanwhile, the Commissioner can show little interest in the inside, neither in traditional festivals, nor in cookie recipes, and certainly not in the robbery of mother earth on a construction site.
And also not for a police officer who scrubs the company car with joy and both hands and watches animal films with his wife after work.
She, in turn, considers her slightly overweight, stupid, jealously innocent husband to be a womanizer.
Until proven otherwise, the Commissioner - blond like herself, but apparently without a steady relationship - wants to seduce Dietmar.
Showered with love
For three seasons, this clash of cultures showed how much public service television underestimated its audience: ARD was rubbing shoulders
the eyes of the love with which the glorious three - supplemented by strong supporting actors - from Hengasch in the Liebernich district were showered by the television viewers.
So little was it possible to believe that precision and quality de luxe, from acting and direction to the music of Andreas Schilling (with a large amount of wind instruments, a virtuoso play with folk music tradition), really made a difference, that the shooting times were like Bjarne's Girl complained, shortened and the ensemble finally lost interest.
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At the end of the three seasons irony was replaced by slapstick;
there was no patience for the village break, during which the comedy was allowed to unfold.
At least, the unsentimental initial constellation remained: You can stumble through ups and downs together, trudge through muddy fields and climb the peaks of the human, but everyone continues to walk in their own way;
here in clacking pumps, there in country-style shoes.
Identity conflicts, that was the nice consolation of this series from the rainy province, cannot be resolved, only survived.
Fortunately for everyone involved and for the audience.
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