'Vienna Blood' Season 1, Episode 1 Recap: "The Last Seance Part 1"

Vienna Blood is the newest mystery series to be added to the PBS lineup. Based on The Liebermann Papers series by Frank Tallis, this series is as much of time and place as character, much like Grantchester. It's a series that dives into the society of 1908 Vienna, Austria, behind the glitter of its gilded age to the uglier, nastier and much bloodier side. The first episode is based on the first novel, Mortal Mischief (retitled A Death In Vienna for American publication). Max Liebermann (Matthew Beard) at a Freud symposium. (Franz Josef Koepp plays the famous doctor.) He's a young intellectual, but an outsider immigrant. His British-Jewish family resettled here, and those around him won't let him forget either one of those labels.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, we meet Inspector Oskar Reinhardt (Jürgen Maurer) and Sgt Haussmann (Josef Ellers), called in over a dead woman in an apartment. She's been shot through the heart, and there's a suicide note that reads in part "I have tasted forbidden fruit, and he will drag me to hell."  But this is not a suicide. The murderer forgot to leave the weapon, and the body is staged, stretched out like a painting. And yet, all the doors and windows are locked from the inside. The missing gun is an antique, and there's no bullet left inside the body.

Reinhardt returns to the station, only to discover he's saddled with a new form of "help." Liebermann has requested to do ride alongs as part of his research, and his father, Mendel (Conleth Hill), is a personal friend of Police Commissioner Strasser (Simon Hatzl). They are an odd couple, the young upper-class intellectual and a grizzled working-class detective, who does not like his new assistant, especially when Liebermann's observations about Reinhardt himself are a little too on the money.