'Luna + Sophie' to Continue as 'Partners in Crime: Potsdam Homicide'

PBS Passport members are most likely aware of the German buddy cop series known in the States as Luna + Sophie, which started streaming here in the spring of 2022. The timing was fortuitous, as it arrived on the platform within days of Annika, which Masterpiece initially launched as an early binge release for members ahead of its linear debut later that year. The two women-led crime series buoyed each other to the point that Luna + Sophie was one of the first Walter Presents shows to land a linear weekly release on PBS stations starting in 2023.

However, it was unclear at the time if Walter Presents would bring more than the current three seasons over, not because the show wasn't popular, but because the series was never about Luna or Sophie. The show's real name is SOKO Potsdam, one of eleven case-of-the-week spinoffs from the popular German police procedural SOKO München, and after the show's first few seasons, both actors exited.

SOKO Potsdam is far from the first series to have its title altered from the original when moving to English-language television; that's the case for almost every series that streams under the Walter Presents banner. Profilage is called The Paris Murders, Il Paradiso Delle Signore, which translates to The Ladies Paradise, is known here merely as Paradise; then, of course, there's my personal favorite, Litsid, the Estonian series whose title literally translates to Whores. That won't fly on PBS, so Walter Presents renamed the series after the lead character, Madame K.