If you’re looking for some TV that speaks to typical TYR preoccupations, 54 Hours might be it. This BBC/WDR coproduction retells the utterly berserk story of the 1988 hostage-taking in Gladbeck, West Germany, and successive police forces’ Keystonesque efforts to end it.
I liked how it was recognizably a film noir without using any of the usual visual tropes. The killers are pretty much perfect small-time hoodlums driven by their poor impulse control, getting into a bigger and bigger plot as they lurch from half-bright idea to desperate solution, but in the best noir tradition, they grow into the role. They instinctively seek out the media – having seen this bit on TV – and constantly give interviews, although they have absolutely nothing to say, stars of their own show in search of a script or rather unaware they are even missing one. The journalists who fawn over them are also great, self-dramatising, self-admiring, self-interested hacks gagging to get in front of their own cameras. And the police chiefs wear a supremely unconvincing authority.
I also liked how it evokes the look and feel of the old Bundesrepublik, when everything was either ancient or brand new. And the whole thing is a classic case study in how having more information, and certainly not information technology, doesn’t necessarily make you smarter.
Each of the various police forces involved tries to manage the crisis from its splendidly appointed situation room, commissioners barking into telephones and swaggering in and out of the mahogany-veneer Konfi, with the support of an arsenal of surveillance technology and many, many Mercedes. But all this fetishisation of decision only serves to help them avoid making decisions. Nobody important ever ventures out to the field to see for themselves, let alone take charge, and still less do they let anyone take the initiative (eh).
The only exceptions are when the radio network collapses (a major incident is not the time for a force-wide VHF frequency change) and when the Dutch get involved, and in both cases it could have finished there; on the first occasion the comms outage lets the cops on the ground act, and on the second, the Dutch chief shows up in person with a simple plan and does better than anyone else managed.
German Wikipedia has a typically excellent factual timeline.