Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

‘Vienna Blood’ is the Jewish answer to your ‘Sherlock’ craving

The latest British import to PBS, “Vienna Blood,” is not about sausage. Its title is a nod to its setting, its grisly, sanguine concerns and to a waltz and operetta (Wiener Blut) by Johann Strauss the Younger. If you already knew that last part, this show is for you.

The series, based on the “Liebermann Papers” novels by psychologist and crime novelist Frank Tallis, follows Max Liebermann (a subdued Matthew Beard), a young neurologist who attends the lectures of Sigmund Freud at the turn of the century who uses his insights on human behavior to solve murders.

Liebermann and his family are bourgeois emigrés who have come from England to Vienna. His father, Mendel (Conleth Hill — who you might remember, with far less hair, as Varys on “Game of Thrones”), owns a drapery business. They are patrons of the arts and victims of the city’s patrician anti-Semitism.

Early on, a man who turns out to be a member of a proto-Fascist group called the “Brotherhood of Tribal Fire” approaches Mendel and offers to introduce him to Christian society: “We decide who is Jewish and who is not.”

Max’s interest in Freud’s emerging field is spurned by his mentor at the hospital, but Max finds his calling when he teams up with Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt (Jürgen Maurer), a gruff but tragic detective who can’t shake him as a shadow. Max proves to be a useful partner for Rheinhardt, able to analyze Freudian slips in suicide notes, probe the motives of killers and suss the meaning of a well-posed corpse.

The first mystery (spoilers!) come to a head in a showdown on a Ferris wheel a la “The Third Man,” and on that Ferris wheel, the apprehended killer sputters to Max, “You think you are so clever. Slippery, cunning like the rest of your sly race.”

In case you haven’t guessed so far, this show is catnip for those interested in pre-World War Jewish life and lovers of fine art. And that’s fine by me.

Early episodes feature the work of two Gustavs (Klimt and Mahler). Klimt’s painting induces a woman’s panic attack while Mahler, subbing in for the advertised pianist, is received tepidly by a mostly non-Jewish audience. The second installments, “The Queen of the Night” parts one and two, take their name from a character in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” and, rest-assured, that operetta will factor into the plot.

These gestures to the highbrow are ornamented with handsome production values and bundled within cleverly-conceived whodunnits. Series creator Stephen Thompson is an alumnus of BBC’s “Sherlock,” and while the plotting and production design here don’t quite match the panache and inventiveness of that show, it nonetheless scratches the prestige sleuthing itch.

It may not, however, fulfill your “Downton Abbey” withdrawal, though it tries its level best. A love triangle between Max, his fiancé, Clara Weiss (Luise von Finckh), and his scientist patient Amelia Lydgate (Jessica De Guow), feels lifeless and perfunctory.

Still, “Vienna Blood” is the optimal guilty pleasure viewing, the televisual equivalent of chocolate-covered fruit — snackable, bad for you, but not without nutritional value. It services a concern with resurgent and historical European anti-Semitism, insights into early criminal profiling and cultured hat tips to the early 1900s, but it’s at its best as half-mindless entertainment.

Whatever your alibi, it’s worth a watch. Meanwhile, we’re still waiting for the young Herr Freud’s own turn solving murders to drop on Netflix later this year.

“Vienna Blood” airs on PBS Sundays at 10 PM ET.

PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected].

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.