The Notebooks of Max Liebermann on France 3: what is this detective series in the vein of Sherlock?

After Grantchester, whose season 5 broadcast ended last Sunday, France 3 is launching this evening a new detective series co-produced by England and Austria: Les Carnets de Max Liebermann (Vienna Blood in VO). Adapted from the eponymous literary saga by British author Frank Tallis, this period detective drama takes us to the beginning of the 20th century, in Vienna, then still capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through the investigations of a duo not like the others.

Max Liebermann, played by Matthew Beard (Dracula, Avenue 5), is a brilliant English neurologist of Jewish faith whose approach differs from that of his colleagues since, while the doctors of the time advocate the use of electroshocks to treat hysteria, the latter, who is a follower of the theories of Sigmund Freud, prefers to use words to treat his patients. When the first episode, “Justice of the Unconscious” begins, Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt (Jürgen Maurer) is entrusted with a rather strange case: a young woman has been found dead at home, lying on a couch in a long white dress. The murder weapon has not been found, the door was closed from the inside, and the police, who hesitate between suicide and murder, do not know what to think.

Rheinhardt is then forced by his superior to the presence of Max Liebermann, who is conducting a study on criminal behavior and can not help but give his opinion on the investigation. And if the police inspector does not welcome the arrival of this observer, he will soon have to face the facts: his extraordinary analytical capacity, his skills in forensic medicine, and his knowledge of human behavior and its deviations are a real asset to solve the most complex criminal cases. The beginnings of an astonishing collaboration, which obviously recalls the many duos of ill-assorted investigators of the small screen, from Castle to Sherlock, passing by Bones. And which allows Max Liebermann’s Notebooks to sketch the beginnings of modern psycho-criminology, through this hero in costume who, nearly two centuries before them, has little to envy the profilers of criminal minds . In the streets of a city then marked by a disturbing darkness which foreshadows the dark hours to come in the rest of the first half of the 20th century, in particular through the anti-Semitism to which the Liebermann family is victim.

Written by Stephen Thompson, who wrote the screenplay for three Sherlock episodes and also worked on the Deep State series, Max Liebermann’s Notebooks to date has a single season consisting of three episodes of 90 minutes each. Which will be broadcast three Sundays in a row on France 3 from tonight. But the success of the series on BBC Two in England and ORF in Austria has already motivated the order of a second season.