Inspector Rex—Season 1: Vienna

Kommissar Rex was a German police-dog cop show that launched in 1994 and ran successfully for a decade, spawning international translations, spin-offs and even imitators in Italy, Russia, and Latvia. Despite the resemblance to American comedy-action films like Turner & Hooch and K-9, the material here is generally serious. In the pilot episode, a bombing case in Vienna (with Cold War intrigue overtones) leaves a policeman dead and his German Shepherd dog partner Rex bereaved, although the latter eventually manages to bond with a successor—dynamic, young, divorced Detective Moser (Tobias Moretti). The cases they take on involve Eastern European organ thieves, a nuclear dirty-bomb threat by minions of a Polish gangster, and a seeming hate crime against a homeless man that disguises a love triangle. There's even the old plot of Moser going undercover as a sanitarium inmate to catch a serial killer. The fact that Rex sometimes does a Rin Tin Tin routine and comes to the rescue does lend a slightly campy feeling, but mostly this is a sturdy procedural that occasionally pushes some hot buttons (such as a fatalistic bandit with an AIDS diagnosis). Compiling all 14 episodes from the 1994-95 debut season, this is recommended. (C. Cassady)