Screenwriting and dramaturgy

In everyday German die Reihe is a row of seats, a queue or your turn: Du bist an der Reihe. In television it names a format, and it is the word in this list an English speaker is most likely to get wrong, because « series » covers ground that German divides in two. Eine Serie runs in episodes on a fixed slot and, more and more often, tells one story across a whole season. Eine Reihe is a run of self-contained, feature-length films that share an investigator, a town or a premise; each film ends where it ends, and they can be watched in any order. The long-running Sunday-night crime films are the textbook case. Much of the quarrel over format in German television comes down to this pair: whether broadcasters should go on commissioning Reihen, or whether the future belongs to serials that are horizontal erzählt, where missing one episode means losing the thread.