Boerne to burnout
Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers) pops
What: WDR/Bavaria Fiction GmbH/Thomas
The world of social media is still new territory for the “Tatort” team from Münster. This has consequences for the investigations into the murdered influencer “MagicMom”. And for the tightness of the thigh slappers. An experience report.
Kinspectors on television like to be a bit stupid. pathologists in particular. They even have to be. Because they want to know something that only perpetrators, but neither they nor we can know, because they are not allowed to be smarter than those for whom they are providing information late on Sunday evening. One could come up with a number of reasons for the sometimes rather marginal intellectual equipment of “crime scene” investigators.
One of the more central, however, provides the core narrative pattern for “MagicMom”. That’s the name of the new case for Boerne and Thiel. They are now in their 21st “crime scene” year.
And it is their task again and again, as old, white, philistine representatives of their consistently aging television audience, not only to enlighten them about the real perpetrators of various murder cases, but also about new phenomena and dangers of our time.
Like teacher Bömmel in the “Feuerzangenbowle” they act completely stupid and in the course of an investigation, for example, get to know the madness that is spreading so widely in the so-called social media.
They then appear as if they have spent the past – let’s say – five years in Münster’s well-chilled pathology department. Now they have been picked out and they are standing in an aseptically tidy, cold villa equipped with all modern frills, under the corpse of a woman who – before she obviously hanged herself – has led a business model to some success that Boerne and Thiel are highly suspicious of .
Evita Vogel, who is hanging in the stairwell with a power cable around her neck, was a mumfluencer. She had 630,000 followers, to whom she told in funny videos about her seemingly perfect life as a housewife and mother, provided life support for all her fellow sufferers who were overwhelmed by the complex everyday life of a mother, and advertised everything possible. Obviously perfectly organized in a perfect family.
Victim’s competitor: BusyBine (Agnes Decker)
What: WDR/Bavaria Fiction GmbH/Thomas
You don’t have to have spent the past five years in Münster’s “Tatort” history in pathology to immediately suspect that “MagicMom” (that was the title Evita gave herself in her blog, by the way) is not about the problems modern motherhood is not about the pressure that an optimization-addicted society puts on mothers and that they put on themselves. The Münster Commissariat isn’t just a social welfare office, it’s a comedy barracks.
Of course everything happens. The fake life that is being exhibited on TikTok and YouTube, the hate that success on the internet entails, the radical capitalization of the private sphere, it’s about gender, about gender roles. But it all serves above all the higher honor of the greatest possible density of punch lines. On the twelve-point Münsteraner thigh-knocker scale, “MagicMom” achieves a smooth eleven.
The worst old man jokes are made, in the best screwball manner the jokes between Boerne and Thiel, between Alberich aka Boerne’s assistant and Schraderchen aka Thiel’s gay assistant fly through the air like blue beans. The flight altitude is not particularly high for all of them.
Boerne goes TikTok
But that makes almost no difference. Because Michaela Kezele translated Regine Bielefeld’s book into perspective-rich images. Pretty artistic and species appropriate. Again and again “MagicMom” takes up the imagery of the influencers. Boerne, for example, is allowed to explain in a rather sharp TikTok video what “bigot” actually means.
Jan Josef Liefers and Axel Prahl, Christine Ursprechen and Björn Meyer also apparently had a lot of fun with the ironic shooting. They pull the bon mots easily from the hip. And like to meet. Their goal is of course – in this Thiel, Haller and Schrader are also the representatives of their audience – above all the poppy arch-bourgeois Boerne. Some of the list of Boerne corruptions is processed. Real burners are there. That goes until Boern-out.
This time he’s driving a wonderful Corvette. Of course, that alone is an argument for “MagicMom”. The rest of the story actually too. In Münster, people have talked below their level. “MagicMom” is a relatively perfect Münster “crime scene”.