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

“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.