Tatort ("Crime Scene") is a German-language police procedural television series that has been running continuously since 1970 with 30 feature-length episodes per year, making it the longest-running German TV drama.

Developed by the German public-service broadcasting organization ARD for their channel Das Erste, it is unique in its approach in that it is jointly produced by all of the organization's regional members as well as its partnering Austrian and Swiss national public-service broadcasters, whereby every regional station contributes several episodes to a common pool.

Alongside the member stations of the ARD, the national Austrian broadcasting corporation Österreichischer Rundfunk joined the production pool in 1971 and aired the program on its ORF 2 channel.

Each of the eleven companies involved (the nine German regional TV channels or Landesrundfunkanstalten that together form ARD, plus ORF in Austria and SRF in Switzerland) produces its episodes.

When Tatort was developed as a series of weekly feature film-long local crime stories, the stated concept was used to distribute financial and organizational efforts.

Apart from the unique joint-pooling system, the series is also characterized by the episode length of around 90 minutes, which allows for more in-depth and psychological fleshing out of the characters.

On several occasions, the actual police work is just a side note in the story, as the main plot might focus on how one of the persons involved deals with the crime and its aftermath.

With the national broadcasting corporations of Austria and Switzerland participating, the episodes of Tatort are currently set in various cities of Germany, Vienna, and Zürich.

A similar concept of independently filming and then pooling episodes was used from 1988 to 1992 in the series Eurocops, jointly produced by several national European TV stations.

In 2023, the American-based international television streaming service MHz Choice signed a deal with WDR and Radio Bremen for the rights to 250 of their episodes.

That streaming service also has a selection of subtitled older episodes of the current Berlin, Cologne, Göttingen, Kiel, Munich, and Weimar teams from previous deals.

[2] Gunther Witte, dramatist and TV head at WDR (West German Broadcasting Cologne) developed the series against initial resistance.

[3] Witte and his successors have ensured that one or two detectives are at the center of every story, and the cases are shown from their perspective; they are usually members of a team, and their lives are also included.

In 2012, more than 100,000 people participated in the first and only online game linked to the SWR Tatort production, "Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget.

In 1990, Polizeiruf practiced its brand of German reunification with episode 142, "Unter Brüdern" [de] ("Amongst Brothers"), a crossover with the Tatort investigators Schimanski and Thanner (this was co-produced with ARD and a medley of the two series themes were used in the opening intro).

There have been over 1100 episodes of Tatort, from November 1970 up to the beginning of January 2020[8] these have been the product of a dozen broadcasters, based around various lead investigators.

Last update: 22 Jul 2023 Some Tatort episodes from the 1980s and 1990s included songs that subsequently became quite well known, and two of them reached the top of the charts: "Faust auf Faust (Schimanski)" by Klaus Lage from the Tatort movie On the Killer's Track [de], and "Midnight Lady" by Chris Norman, written by Dieter Bohlen, which appears on the episode "Der Tausch" [de].