Season 1 • Episode 14
LatestStockinger is an Austrian-made police television drama, with fourteen 45-minute episodes first aired from 1996 to 1997. The series is a spin-off from the popular Austrian television drama Inspector Rex, and focuses on Ernst Stockinger, one of the original members of the Homicide division or Mordkommission in German. Stockinger leaves the series to return to Salzburg where his wife has inherited a dental practice from her late father . He is appointed a Bezirksinspektor at the Landes Gendarmerie, sharing an office with District Inspector Antonella Simoni. Unlike the members of the team in 'Rex', who appear to be self-directed and are seldom seen to answer to senior management, Stockinger reports to Dr Brunner, a philosophising burecratic senior police inspector. Stockinger is portrayed as a clumsy, almost Inspector Clouseau-like character, driving a clapped-out 1973 VW Variant, but single-minded when following up clues.
Acting
Karl Markovics owns the bumbling-everyman energy completely.
Production
That 1973 VW Variant is basically a character.
Writing
Dr. Brunner's philosophical bureaucratic monologues are gold.
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Karl Markovics later won Best Actor at Cannes for 'The Counterfeiters' (2007), proving Stockinger's bumbling was pure performance.
Inspector Rex became a massive Austrian-German-Italian co-production phenomenon; Stockinger's Salzburg exile was network spin-off calculus before streaming made it mainstream.
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