The BEST Das Erste shows of all time

#1 - Irgendwie und sowieso

#2 - Hubert und/ohne Staller

A show about two police officers from Wolfsrathausen, who sometimes work a bit differently.

#3 - Großstadtrevier

Großstadtrevier is a German television series, broadcast on Germany's Das Erste of the ARD. First aired on 16 December 1986, the show is one of the most popular television series in the country. It follows the everyday work of a fictional police station on the Kiez of Hamburg.

#4 - Die Sendung mit der Maus

Short movies explain different things of everyday life, they are followed by a short sequence of animated clips.

#5 - Kir Royal

#6 - Heimat

Spanning 1919 to 1982, in the fictional village of Schabbach, lives Maria Simon and her family, whose lives and community are changed by historical events around them.

#7 - Homicide Hills

Sophie Haas had actually been looking forward to finally being promoted to head of Cologne's homicide squad. But instead, she is unexpectedly transferred to the fictitious provincial town of Hengasch, where murder and manslaughter are nowhere in sight. At least that's how it seems at first glance. However, behind the perfect façade of the sleepy Eifel village, abysses soon open up that provide the ambitious city detective with enough food for thought to prevent her from becoming bogged down behind a desk in her job. Together with her rather staid police colleagues Dietmar Schäffer and Bärbel Schmied, she goes on the hunt for criminals in the rural environment. The series lives from its lovingly drawn quirky characters and their very special humour.

#8 - Tatort

Tatort is a long-running German/Austrian/Swiss, crime television series set in various parts of these countries. The show is broadcast on the channels of ARD in Germany, ORF 2 in Austria and SF1 in Switzerland. The first episode was broadcast on November 29, 1970. The opening sequence for the series has remained the same throughout the decades, which remains highly unusual for any such long-running TV series up to date. Each of the regional TV channels which together form ARD, plus ORF and SF, produces its own episodes, starring its own police inspector, some of which, like the discontinued Schimanski, have become cultural icons. The show appears on DasErste and ORF 2 on Sundays at 8:15 p.m. and currently about 30 episodes are made per year. As of May 2023, 1239 episodes in total have been produced.

#9 - Weissensee

Two families in East Berlin that couldn't be more different: the Kupfers, who function as a powerful cog in the GDR system, and the Hausmanns, who come from a more critical milieu. When Martin Kupfer falls in love with Julia Hausmann, this love shakes the foundations on which the two families have built their lives. The first family series on German television set in the former GDR.

#10 - Auf Achse

#11 - Rivals Forever

The life and struggle of the Dassler brothers. Founders of the brands of Adidas and Puma.

#12 - The Little Vampire

13 part television series based on the books: "The Little Vampire" and "The Little Vampire Moves In" by Angela Sommer-Bodenburg.

#13 - Berlin, Berlin

Out of school, ready to live together with friends and learn to know new friends in the big city of Berlin, where everything isn't always going according to the plan.

#14 - World on a Wire

Somewhere in the future there is a computer project called Simulacron one of which is able to simulate a full featured reality, when suddenly project leader Henry Vollmer dies. His successor Dr. Fred Stiller experiences odd phenomena. A good friend, Guenther Lause, disappears in the middle of a conversation and a week later nobody has ever heard of him. And those fits of dizzyness - Stiller cannot believe himself to be fool. There has to be an explanation for all this. Could Simulacron have something to do with it?

#15 - 54 Hours: The Gladbeck Hostage Crisis

Acclaimed two-part series based on the true story of an unprecedented hostage crisis which shocked Germany in the summer of 1988. Two robbers hold up a bank and demand free passage from the police while taking bank employees hostage.

#16 - Turkish for Beginners

In Berlin, a single mother of a teenage daughter, begins a relationship with a widowed Turkish father and his two teenage children. Will they be able to live together in harmony?

#17 - Charité

The series describes the accomplishments of several famous German physicians and scientists at the prestigious Charité hospital in Berlin towards the end of the 19th century.

#18 - NSU German History X

In the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain a clandestine far-right German terrorist group called National Socialist Underground or NSU began operating in Germany by killing immigrants in cold blood, termed the Bosphorus Serial Murders. The victims are brutally slayed with the same gun. The police never even consider a right-wing conspiracy – despite evidence to the contrary – and focus on internal ethnic feuds. So while these decent people are dying, the German authorities are heaping scorn on them, accusing them of drug dealing and hinting at loose morals. Hovering above them are three comrades who've been arrested and let go time and time again: Beate, Böhni and Uwe.

#19 - Maria Wern

A Swedish policewoman is confronted with crime on Gotland Island.

#20 - Dark Woods

Within a few weeks, two murdered lovers were found in the Göhrde state forest in Lower Saxony in the summer of 1989. The popular local recreation area was quickly given the name “Totenwald” in public. When another woman later disappears, in contrast to the previous murders, the police quickly have a suspect on hand: the husband of the disappeared. His brother-in-law, a high-ranking criminal investigator, does not believe in his guilt. The investigation is said to drag on for decades and only after his retirement does he come across revealing inconsistencies in the investigation in the early 1990s. Could this reveal the entire secret of the “forest of the dead”?

#21 - Warten auf'n Bus

At a bus stop in deepest Brandenburg, where you can practically already guess the end of the Milky Way, the dissipated late-forties Hannes and his friend Ralf, called Ralle, meet to talk about God and the world. Their only connections to a world beyond the bus stop are the bus driver Kathrin and the exceptionally stupid and ugly dog Maik.

#22 - Marnow Murders

The city of Schwerin is sweltering under a heat wave never seen before. Detectives Lona Mendt and Frank Elling are on the trail of a serial murderer, who seems to choose his victims at random. But nothing is what it seems.

#23 - Oderbruch

The sinister discovery of numerous murder victims shocks the Oderbruch region. The serial murder case brings Detective Roland Voit to his hometown to work with Polish police officer Stanislaw Zajak. Voit’s former colleague and childhood sweetheart, Maggie Kring, is also called in to join the police investigation when her family comes under immediate suspicion. In their investigation, Maggie and Voit delve deep into their own past to finally uncover the true circumstances of the death of Maggie’s brother and the sinister truth of this case, which lies beyond human imagination.

#24 - Oktoberfest: Beer & Blood

Deceit, betrayal and murder ensue when two powerful family breweries go to war over the world-famous beer festival in early 20th-century Munich.

#25 - The Turncoat

1944. Walter Proska is a young Wehrmacht soldier who begins to question the purpose of the war, who the real enemy is and whether his real duty should be to his fatherland or his own conscience.

#26 - The Vanishing

20-year-old Janine Grabowski disappears in a small Bavarian town near the Czech border. While all evidence indicates that Janine secretly wanted to leave the backcountry, her mother, Michelle, becomes increasingly convinced that there's something amiss. Michelle's missing person's report is quickly filed away by the police. So the single mother is forced to investigate at her own risk. The longer she hunts for an answer to Janine's disappearance, the more she discovers about her daughter and the people with whom she kept company. She begins to doubt whether Janine even wants to be found.