'Vienna Blood's Leading Duo on Season 4 & *That* Cliffhanger

Matthew Beard as Max and Juergen Maurer as Oskar in Vienna Blood Season 4

Matthew Beard as Max and Juergen Maurer as Oskar in Vienna Blood Season 4

Petro Domenigg © 2024 Endor Productions / MR Film

“A fully-developed bromance” flourishing as they face “trying to solve a major crime at the end of the Austrian Empire.” That’s how Vienna Blood star Juergen Maurer describes the relationship between his character, Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt, and Dr. Max Liebermann as the pre-Great War mystery series’s fourth (and regrettably, likely last) season, which debuted on PBS on January 5. Maurer’s co-star Matthew Beard, who plays the young Jewish Freudian Max, concurs, describing his character in the first season as “com[ing] along with all these theories of the mind, which just sounds like nonsense” to the initially very skeptical Oskar. The beginning of their odd-couple partnership was not auspicious, with the two men “at very different ends of the spectrum of how we view crime solving.” 

Things have changed dramatically since then, with their characters developing mutual respect and a strong rapport. Beard notes that while any Freudian implications of Max and Oskar’s relationship are subtextual, “we’ve definitely enjoyed, over the years, watching fans’ reactions.” 

PBS viewers got a special shout-out, too, as Beard notes that their responses have “always been really funny to me and Juergen when we’ve been doing certain scenes.” He didn’t elaborate further, but it doesn’t take a degree in neurology to guess that moments such as Max and Oskar waltzing in a café to imagine how a particular poisoning took place or Max nipping in the bud Oskar’s apology for lateness to the opera with a quip like “let’s not have a row about it, darling” may have been top of mind. 

Maurer and Beard, whose warm working relationship is apparent even on Zoom, gamely answered both broad and minutely detailed questions during a press roundtable just before the winter holidays. Max and Oskar’s rapport has strengthened over time as the pair have solved three major cases in each season, covering 1906-1908. Since that has brought to the screen all nine books of source material in Frank Tallis’s Liebermann Papers series, series creator Steve Thompson was free to write the fourth season to cover a single, hugely consequential mystery. 

Instead of a mystery-of-the-week approach, Vienna Blood is now a noir serial encompassing not just multiple murders but a massive, years-long political conspiracy that threatens to upend the entire empire. The singular villain is a shadowy yet deadly puppetmaster known only as Mephisto, who seems to have a near-supernatural ability to get ahead of and repeatedly foil many of Oskar and Max’s investigative moves.

By the end of the first episode, both Intelligence Director Strasser and Burgsteller, an arms dealer with the first information worth sharing about Mephisto in years, are dead from snipers’ bullets, with a third man found in a bathhouse with his throat slit. The appearance of a very fancy gambling chip and a cipher-text decoder have given Oskar and Max (accompanied by Leah and Clara) reason to go undercover for a visit to Riegers Palace, a high-end casino run by the shrewd Fraulein Riegers (Leonie Benesch, who viewers may recognize from Babylon Berlin’s first three seasons, or from the trailer for the Munich 1972 Olympics thriller September 5). 

Luise von Finckh as Clara Weiss, Matthew Beard as Max and Juergen Maurer as Oskar in 'Vienna Blood' Season 4

Luise von Finckh as Clara Weiss, Matthew Beard as Max and Juergen Maurer as Oskar in 'Vienna Blood' Season 4 

Petro Domenigg © 2024 Endor Productions / MR Film

In addition to standing out as a woman running a massive and lucrative casino, Riegers turns the tables very effectively on Max, using his techniques of Freudian observation to inform him that she’s seen directly through his guise of English nobleman Lord Sadler, that he and Clara (Luise von Finckh, playing at Lady Sadler) are plainly not married, though he obviously cares deeply for her. Max is both thrown and impressed by Riegers’s observations, confessing his feelings to Clara before they return to the Palace for him to join the high-stakes total game of chance Chemin de Fer with three other high rollers who will bet using any currency they can access – money, property, secrets, even people. 

Corpses piling up, echoes of a prior case in which Max and Oskar did not get their man, Serbian nationalist Lazar Kiss, and state secrets getting traded like so many baseball cards? That’s a recipe for noir, a genre development both Beard and Maurer relish. Beard highlights Vienna’s history as the setting for one of the greatest films in the genre, Orson Welles’ The Third Man, which mirrors the climax of Vienna Blood’s very first mystery, making it “quite special to be doing a long talking scene in a carriage of the Riesenrad.” 

Serendipitously, Beard has had quite a noir-steeped year, appearing last winter in the AMC+ noir series Monsieur Spade. Working on that series “unlocked a whole other wave of things” for him, including recalling how much humor is in film noir, a facet that Thompson carries through in his scripts, especially in the fizzy, funny interactions between Max and Oskar that are such a hallmark of the show. 

Juergen Maurer as Oskar in Vienna Blood Season 4

Juergen Maurer as Oskar in Vienna Blood Season 4

Petro Domenigg © 2024 Endor Productions / MR Film

The transition to noir was further smoothed by what Beard described as the genre’s “big characters and very over-the-top performances…that gave us license in Vienna Blood to have these great baddies,” noting that “there’s not really such a thing as too much in the show.” For his part, Maurer connected strongly with another aspect of the series’s foray into noir, which is how well-suited the genre is to responding to roiling political and social conditions. 

In this season’s 1909 setting, “you see that a structure, a society is about to get destroyed” once the Great War breaks out in 1914. Oskar feels that “the whole thing needs to be protected…I think you could compare it to democracy at the moment”. The contemporary resonances extend to the fear that an imperfect but stable system of government could collapse, offering “a similar vibe to the story” Vienna Blood is telling this year. 

Calling back to and weaving the events of Season 2’s “The Devil’s Kiss” into the fourth season arc recontextualizes Vienna Blood as taking place on a broader canvas of world-shaking events than most mystery series. Would-be bomber Lazar Kiss could only have known about the top-secret negotiations between Austria-Hungary and Russia at Laxenburg through information gathered from a government mole, and if that person is Mephisto, what other top-secret intelligence have they been acquiring and selling? 

Matthew Beard as Max Liebermann in Vienna Blood Season 4

Matthew Beard as Max Liebermann in Vienna Blood Season 4

Petro Domenigg © 2024 Endor Productions / MR Film

Reminding viewers of Kiss, a Serbian nationalist willing to kill and die for his cause, also foreshadows the precipitating event of The Great War, Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s 1914 assassination in Sarajevo.

The co-leads are energized by what Beard described as the “slightly bigger risks” of the cliffhanger ending of “A Winning Hand” and the season’s longer storytelling arc. The episode provides yet one more element encouraging viewers to recall real-world historical events like Franz Ferdinand’s assassination when Max himself is shot as he is racing back to the casino floor through the twisting passageways of the subterranean caverns where Chemin de Fer is played. 

Whether Max was felled by Oscar’s bullet or one from an assassin’s rifle-and-silencer, whether he lives or dies, Oskar will need to rely heavily on his recollections of his and Max’s earlier casework to get to the bottom of Mephisto’s network and increasingly expansive, deadly sticky web of intrigue. 

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Vienna Blood

Dr. Max Liebermann and DI Oskar Rheinhardt team up to solve mysteries in 1900s Vienna.
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Vienna Blood: show-poster2x3

Vienna Blood Season 4 continues on most PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel at 10 p.m. ET on Sundays through the end of January. All four episodes are available for members to watch as a binge (or as initially intended, i.e., two two-hour-long episodes) on PBS Passport. As always, check your local listings and streamers. 


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Sophie has been happily steeping in the potent brew of British TV since her parents let her stay up late on a Thursday watching the Jeremy Brett adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. She loves mysteries, espionage thrillers, documentaries, and costume dramas, and if you're not careful, she might talk your ear off about the Plantagenets. Sorry about that in advance! 

You can find Sophie on all the platforms as @sophiebiblio and keep an eye on her bylines from all over the internet via her handy portfolio.

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