‘Die Toten von Marnow’ (‘Marnow Murders,’ 2021)
Long-format television – six to eight hours to tell a single story, several seasons to follow (if ratings allow) – may have started in America with HBO. But its European manifestation has given us a lot of good viewing in 13 years since “The Killing” and “The Bridge” changed how we watch drama, and with it our expectations of stories. Stories have become more complex and the storytelling more intricate.
With that has come a lot of dross. Formulaic stories with caricatures instead of characters, detectives with ever-more exaggerated defects – we might even call them “defectives.” Watch the first 15 minutes and you’re back at the menu looking for something different. Those 15 minutes count on the algorithmic profile that platforms are building, however, and forever you’ll be overwhelmed by prompts for the sort of thing you wish you hadn’t tried to watch at all.
Not so with “Die Toten von Marnow,” a title much better than the English translation that hit our screens. “Marnow Murders” conveys a sense of yet another turn of the crank of some AI-based writing machine. Pick a new location. Write the same old story. The German title focuses on the dead, however, and how they came to be no more, and that’s important. Is there a serial killer on the loose? So far, so familiar. But the storytelling soon takes over and we’ve delving into a history that some Germans (and pharmaceutical companies) know but would rather forget, and others may never have known about.
That too is a common plot. What impressed me about the writing, however, was how the narrative emerges from its fragments. I think of it this way: The storytelling works by piecing back together most but far from all the thousands of shards of glass from the windshield of a car that’s been in a fatal collision with something, where the other object has vanished. That’s not the plot, just a metaphor.
A novel would have had a narrator of some sort. But screenplays don’t have that comforting device, that crutch of epistemology, of knowing, unless for some reason the writers insert what people in live television production call a continuity announcer, the disembodied voice linking one show with the next.
“Die Toten von Marnow,” like the best of this format of television, jumps in time and place, demanding that viewers concentrate over its eight episodes and six running hours, remembering characters from earlier and years back from the present. This structure commands attention. The viewer becomes an active participant in meaning-making, much as Dewey (1934/1958) theorized was the case for all art. It is far from the “cool” passivity that Marshall McLuhan thought the technology of television must induce. The viewer is building something from the pieces of narrative, much as the characters are in piecing clues together to find the killer, while uncovering why these several people have had to die.
This show isn’t unique in that regard, but it’s good at it. The lead actors both won best in class at the German Television Awards. The show got a nomination for best mini-series.
Dewey, J. (1934/1958). Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn.