Netflix has added Murder Mindfully, a German comedy thriller based on a bestselling book that immediately reminds you of Breaking Bad.
Like Walter White, Breaking Bad's main character, mafia lawyer Björn Diemel (Tom Schilling) is a frustrated, clever man who turns to crime. But what makes this funny and unique is that Björn starts a murder spree after getting into mindfulness! The few German TV series I’ve seen I've enjoyed and like Kleo, about a likable East German assassin, which I watched on Netflix earlier this year, this is also quirky and fun. It also has echoes of the humor in Killing Eve.
The opening scene sets the tone perfectly. Björn is a nice guy. He's shown carefully avoiding squashing a poor little snail but the next minute he's seen calmly shredding a man's foot!
As he explains: "I've never been a violent guy. Quite the opposite in fact. I never got into schoolyard fights. Or bar fights, for that matter. I didn't even kill anybody until I was 42. To be fair I did rack up half a dozen bodies that first week. But who's counting? And I had really, really good reasons. I'd recently embraced mindfulness. The killing was all kinda downstream of that. It was my way of finally finding some of that coveted work-life balance."
We then go back three months to see what drives Björn to murder. His life's rubbish. He's running around defending horrible mobster Dragan Sergowicz which leaves him no time for his young daughter or his wife. His colleagues despise him for his mafia links and even the petty office manager delights in giving him a hard time.
His wife suggests he tries mindfulness and a desperate Björn agrees and heads off to see a hilarious Yoda-like figure called Joschka Breitner who comes out with lines like: "Running doesn't make the road short."
Finally paying attention to the present, rather than letting all his stresses crowd his mind, Björn starts to feel happy and heads off alone with his daughter for a relaxing weekend break. But Dragan then forces Björn to head back into town to discuss the fact he's managed to murder a drug rival in front of a bus full of 12-year-olds.
Björn responds: "So, we're talking about up to fifty videos that show you killing someone in front of school children, am I getting this correctly?" As the cop on the case later puts it: "We've never had such a slam-dunk homicide case."
By now your sympathy is completely with Björn. Here he is trying to go on a break with his daughter and this mafia idiot is ruining everything. But then Björn remembers mindfulness and concludes the answer is to kill the man ruining his peaceful state of mind.
Watching the series actually makes me want to read the book it's based on by Karsten Dusse, which has sold over a million copies in Germany and will be released in English in January. Murder Mindfully has a different vibe to most TV series. Tom Schilling is great as Björn and the crazy plot just works.
Murder Mindfully is on Netflix now.
