# The Pleasure Principle (2019)

> Three very different police officers in four post-communist cities discover their separate murder cases are linked and must cooperate to catch the killer.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/71361

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 10
- Episode runtime: 56 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: crime, thriller
- Network: Canal+
- Cast: Karel Roden, Małgorzata Buczkowska, Stipe Erceg, Magdalena Boczarska, Mirosław Baka, Mirosław Haniszewski, Serhiy Strelnykov, Robert Gonera
- TMDB rating: 6.7/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7678042/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: moderate
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: moderate
- Tone: grim, tense, brooding, atmospheric, sombre

## Synopsis

The Pleasure Principle (2019) is a Polish-Czech-German crime miniseries created for Canal+, a ten-episode limited series that plays like a pan-European police thriller. Karel Roden stars as Viktor Seifert, one of three sharply contrasting criminal police officers, alongside Małgorzata Buczkowska as Maria Sokolowska and Stipe Erceg as Anton Fried. Each investigator works a mysterious killing in a different post-communist city, Warsaw, Prague, Odesa or Leipzig, and the team's engine is the slow realization that these apparently separate murders are connected. Every episode moves the case across borders, with the detectives having to set aside their differences and their national jurisdictions to pursue a common enemy. The tone is grim, tense and procedural, with a brooding atmosphere shaped by the regional histories of the cities, and the crimes are presented with disturbing, unsentimental realism. Fans of The Bridge, Hinterland and Spiral will find resonance in its cross border structure, its mismatched detectives and its European noir sensibility.

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