German Series in North America  Murder Mindfully

A burned-out Berlin defense attorney in thrall to a gangster takes a mindfulness course and finds enlightenment. Not the path of virtue, but the way to dispatch the biggest problem in his life, namely the gangster. But then he has to assume control of the gangster’s criminal operation himself. The premise of Netflix’s Murder Mindfully (a.k.a. Achtsam Morden in Germany) could have been generated from a word cloud describing previous hit crime series. In the new generation of streaming shows, familiarity breeds content.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

Murder Mindfully is based on a bestselling novel by Karsten Dusse, and one can’t help thinking here was a novel that all but begged to be turned into a limited series. Lightly seedy Berlin attorney Björn Diemel (Tom Schilling) is at the beck and call of Dragan Sergowicz (Sascha Gersak, in full sweaty, untamed bear mode), a singularly volatile crime boss. When Dragan publicly murders a rival gang’s drug runner, the ensuing crisis threatens to derail what little family life Diemel has, until his wife Katharina (Emily Cox) urges him to take a mindfulness course with Joschka Breitner (Peter Jordan). The lessons about self-care Diemel takes from Breitner’s teachings inspire him to remove the biggest problem in his life, i.e., Dragan. But Diemel soon finds himself sliding down that slippery terrain known to viewers of many a crime series. With one murder on his CV, Diemel has to sink deeper into criminality just to cover his tracks, artfully conning Dragan’s own minions, a rival gang, and a police detective (Britta Hammelstein) who isn’t taken in by his patter. What are the odds she’ll turn up some small piece of evidence that Diemel overlooked? Over eight episodes the twists and turns land as if timed with a stopwatch. In the U.S., when one hovers over Murder Mindfully on Netflix, a blurb even pops up on screen to ask “What if Saul Goodman became Dexter?”, which feels like giving the game away.

HOW MUCH IS A S(C)HILLING WORTH

Murder Mindfully is a crash course in dark, deadpan German humor. It offers just enough drollery, with the occasional detour into macabre slapstick, to overcome the familiarity of the premise. And the cast guarantees the viewer will keep watching. Tom Schilling has built a fine career as the thinking man’s thinking man of German film: the intellectually overcaffeinated slacker in Oh Boy (a.k.a. A Coffee in Berlin), a stand-in for Gerhard Richter in Never Look Away, and the doomed Weimar Everyman in Fabian, to name just a few standout roles. No tough guy, Diemel is a man who lives or dies by his wits — in key moments, the most dramatic action takes place in his temples. No actor is better suited to that than Schilling.  The standout in the supporting cast is Murathan Muslu as Sascha, Diemel’s eventual right-hand man. Hulking Sascha looks like a mob enforcer if ever there was one, yet Muslu gives him a continually surprising air of sorrowful worldliness that lifts the character above cliché.

BREAKING BAD MILD

The show’s central joke is that successfully assuming control of a criminal empire depends on heeding the placid wisdom of a life coach. Author Dusse may have had a satirical point in his novel, namely that the principles of mindfulness, far from being inherently virtuous, are instead amoral and can be applied in any direction.

The trouble with Murder Mindfully is that after Diemel has received his coaching in the first episode, every time he finds himself in a jam thereafter, he flashes back to the mindfulness lessons Breitner instilled in him. Voila, problem solved, at least temporarily. This happens in the second episode and in the next. And the next. While Diemel’s circumstances inevitably get more precarious, the solution is always the same. Halfway through the series, a viewer might assume that a plot twist is on the way that will shake up the routine, but no such surprise arrives.

The result is that for a story built around mortal peril, the stakes feel curiously low. This is a crime comedy that is content to remain amusing. Amiable, even. Which is fine on one level; there’s no shortage of hair-raising crime stories to binge-watch elsewhere. Murder Mindfully is not out to mess with the viewer’s blood pressure. But given the acting talent the creators here had at their disposal, an air of underachievement wafts in by the end. And it’s hard to overlook how the final installment can’t seem to find a satisfying climactic punchline.

WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU WATCH

Murder Mindfully goes down smoothly. The half-hour episodes never overstay their welcome, and there are no extraneous subplots to pad the season, a rarity for a streaming series. Monika Plura’s sleek cinematography, particularly in the nighttime views of Berlin, could make a viewer want to pet their television. For plenty of audiences that may be enough. Murder Mindfully could be a bellwether of the state of streaming TV, now that streaming’s initial novelty, and the accompanying sense of creative possibility, are over. The streamers are retrenching, with ad tiers and less adventurous programming. Par for the course circa 2024–25, Murder Mindfully boasts marquee-worthy acting talent, handsome production values, and a veneer of edginess to distinguish it from something one might see on broadcast TV (younger readers, ask your parents), such as a severed finger that’s the basis for a near-inexhaustible running gag. Yet for all that the series feels meticulously cross-stitched from half a dozen earlier binge-watching hits. The streamers may not be interested in creative risks anymore. Instead, they’re all about giving viewers more of what they already liked — and they have the data to prove it.

“Murder Mindfully” a.k.a. “Achtsam Morden”
Limited series, 2024
Eight episodes, 30 min. each
Starring: Tom Schilling, Emily Cox, Marc Hosemann, Murathan Muslu, Britta Hammelstein, Sascha Gersak
Production Company: Constantin Television/Netflix
After the Book series by Karsten Dusse