In some episodes, Kommissar Keller even asks everyone to gather at the scene of the crime so that he, in the manner of Hercule Poirot, can reconstruct the events leading up to, and following, the killing so that the murderer can eventually be arrested.

In Der Kommissar, author Herbert Reinecker neatly captures the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s by presenting many young characters that are involved in a crime.

In Reinecker's world, a young girl who leaves her parents and moves from the country to the anonymous and evil big city—Munich—will necessarily end up as either a prostitute, or a drug addict, or a murder victim, or all of the above.

Also, at a time of shifting moral standards in the wake of the Sexual Revolution, Keller can only shake his head—only inwardly though—at the follies of middle-aged bourgeois people who think they can practise infidelity and get away with it unscathed.

As a matter of fact Der Kommissar is full of bizarre relationships: There is the middle-aged wife of an academic who starts an affair with the young waiter of the local restaurant although the latter lives in a rented room and his landlady sees and hears everything; there is the wealthy entrepreneur who takes a liking to the attractive wife of his live-in servant and who arranges for her to spend the nights with him upstairs in the master bedroom; and there is the mother of a teenage daughter who, whenever her husband is working the night shift, sleeps with a boy the same age as her daughter.