8 TV shows you should watch to learn about Austrian culture
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Loading... - Daniel Moser
- 28 Mar 2022
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You’re immensely curious about Austrian culture, but you’re also looking for that next bingeable series to curl up to on the couch.
Whether you’re a local newcomer wanting to experience classic Austrian television or a global citizen just hoping to learn something new, look no further.
One of these shows is bound to capture your intrigue—and you might even learn some German along the way.
What the Austrian locals are watching
Here are some quintessential shows for viewers with some German under their belt.
1. Schnell ermittelt: classic Austrian “Krimi”
No list of Austrian television would be complete without at least one “Krimi”, which is an entire genre of books, films and shows that revolve around fictional crime stories, solved over the course of the plot.
Schnell ermittelt, German for “quickly investigated,” follows chief inspector Angelika Schnell of the Vienna homicide department as she and her team solve murder mysteries with often unconventional methods.
Full of laughs and thrills, this sixty-episode series was described by Austrian newspaper Der Standard as “CSI in good Viennese dialect.”
2. Vorstadtwieber: comedy-drama set in posh Vienna
One of the most successful shows on Austrian television, Vorstadtweiber (“Suburban Women”) has just finished airing its sixth and final season.
Modelled after the US’ Desperate Housewives, this drama-packed satire of upper-class Austria leads viewers behind the shiny facade of Vienna’s suburban elite to the web of secrets, corruption, and lies surrounding five women bent on orchestrating their own financial liberation.
3. Braunschlag: bleak comedy in rural Austria
Out of the big city and into the fictional Lower Austrian village of “Braunschlag,” this critically acclaimed series from 2012 will give you a deeper understanding of Austria’s varying regions and dialects while you laugh along to its absurdist humour.
In order to bring an influx of business to his bankrupt town, the mayor of Braunschlag fakes a supernatural apparition of the Virgin Mary, but the lie runs quickly out of hand, devolving into a crazed cascade of sarcasm and greed that culminates in just eight episodes.
Multicultural understanding
For Austrian residents interested in ethnicity and human rights, consider this weekly update geared toward the country’s cultures in the minority.
4. Heimat, fremde Heimat: weekly inclusion “magazine”
The odd one out on our list, Heimat, fremde Heimat (“Homeland, foreign homeland”) isn’t a bingeworthy serial, but rather an informative weekly TV program focused on minority and immigrant groups in Austria.
In production since 1989, the show covers such topics as human rights, ethnic issues, cultural diversity and coexistence in German and several other languages.
Viewers watching the broadcast on television will have access to subtitles on the ORF Teletext Deaf Service.
An English-friendly look at Austrian culture
For anyone who wants to get a glimpse without being tossed into the deep end of a new language, these shows offer an English language option.
Austrian clichés: How true are these ten stereotypes?
5. Vienna Blood: period crime drama
Set in 1900s Vienna but produced completely in English, this series depicts a rich, fictionalised Austrian past that goes down easy for English-speakers—if they can handle the psychological twists and turns of a thrilling crime-solver.
Currently in its third season, Vienna Blood follows medical student Max Liebermann and detective Oskar Rheinhardt as they investigate harrowing murders in famous Viennese locales, including the state opera house, the natural history museum, traditional cafés and Burggarten Park.
6. Kitz: teen soap-opera set in a ski resort town
In a contemporary narrative aimed at international youth, this 2021 teen soap shines for its exaggerated drama and picturesque Austrian landscapes, and if that’s all you’re looking for, stop here.
Set in the Tyrolean ski resort town of Kitzbühel, the story centres around nineteen-year-old waiter Lisi Madlmeyer and the gilded Munich vacationers who come for a visit.
With a range of language dubs and subtitles, this show provides a look into Austria’s ski resort tradition, even if the accents and local flavour don’t quite match up.
7. Freud: fictionalised period thriller
If it isn’t clear by now, Austrians love to watch a criminal mystery unfold on television. In this dark 2020 crime series, famed Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud is reimagined as a drugged-up Viennese Sherlock Holmes whose only path to solving a warped criminal conspiracy is through the use of his psychoanalytic prowess.
Available with English subtitles, Freud is a macabre trip through 1880s Vienna, with a fair share of visions, nightmares and bare skin. Read More...
