But, 8:15 on a Sunday is not a great time to catch a TV show when your weekends are your only chance to escape Stuttgart thanks to cheap weekend train tickets. Plus, TV shows generally screen at weird quarter-hour intervals here and then last for frustratingly long amounts of time, which means that when a channel tries to schedule a 44 minute American TV show into an hour-and-fifteen minute slot, they have to introduce extra advertisements. But rather than just have longer advertisements at the intervals clearly indicated by fades-to-black and dramatic cliffhangers, instead German TV programmes have one or two excessively long advertisement periods where you could make dinner, clean your kitchen, and forget that you're even watching TV before the show comes back on, in addition to hiccupy little 30-second breaks to even it all out. To add insult to injury, and because you might have read War and Peace in your downtime, the broadcaster then replays a minute or so of the action from before the commercial break.
Anyway, to avoid all that wasted time and catch up on my Tatort, I had the genius idea of watching the on-demand version of the show after it had aired. But, on the Das Erste site, the public broadcaster responsible for this German gem, what did I find but this message: Aus Jugendschutzgründen stehen Ihnen die Videos jeweils ab 20:00 Uhr bis 6:00 Uhr zur Verfügung, or, to protect young people, the videos are only available after 8PM. I don't know any kid who can navigate the internet well enough to find the Tatort who goes to bed before 8, but I guess Das Erste knows best. Heaven forbid a tween should see one of the Kommissars doing something as outlandishly disrespectful as eating Currywurst in the morgue.
image via t-online.de
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