How the Austrian police procedural “Inspector Rex” bridges gaps between languages.

My grandmother, who is ninety-two, has moved three times in her life. She was born in a small town in the province of Shandong, China, and, when she was twenty-three, she took a boat to Shanghai. When she was sixty-three, she moved to Sydney, Australia—where I was born—and then, when she was eighty-five, came with me and my mother to New York. There are a few similarities across these places: all three are port cities—populous, but not the capital—that grew fat off the trade of an eastern coast. Another constant in her life, at least in the past twenty or so years, has been the Austrian police-procedural television show “Inspector Rex,” which is about a crime-fighting dog.

“Rex” débuted in 1994, the year I was born, and ran for eighteen seasons over the course of twenty-one years. A standard episode takes forty-five minutes and follows the titular dog, Rex, who is part of a crack homicide unit in Vienna. (The show was originally filmed in German.) Rex’s colleagues include a lead detective who changes every three to four seasons; an earnest deputy; and a bumbling third guy who stays at the station. Supposedly a family program, the show blends an earnest nineties sensibility—there is a running joke in which Rex finds new ways to steal ham rolls from one of the lesser detectives—with an occasionally macabre flourish. People are killed with poisons, stabbed, thrown from the balcony of a museum, hit over the head with a large wrench. In one typical episode, the lead detective, Moser, investigates a murder in which a woman has been hypnotized into stabbing her boyfriend. As the villain is about to kill Moser with a motorbike, Rex launches out of a bush and tackles him.

My grandmother is a big fan of the show, and many people around the world evidently share her disposition. It was immensely popular in its native Austria and Germany, across Europe, and in Australia, where it ran during prime time on the Special Broadcasting Service, a government-funded multicultural broadcaster. When “Rex” was cancelled by its Austrian channel after ten years, in 2004, the Italian national broadcaster, rai, bought the rights and moved Rex to Rome, such was the nation’s love for the dog. From the streets of Vienna, he now frolicked along the Fountain of Neptune, in the Piazza Navona, with a handsome new Italian human partner named Fabbri. The show has also been remade in Poland (“Komisarz Alex”), Portugal (“Inspetor Max”), Lithuania (“Inspektorius Mažylis”), Slovakia (“Rex”), and Canada (“Hudson & Rex”).

This level of intercontinental popularity can be attributed to two factors. One is the show’s reliable villain-of-the-week structure. The second is its star—a stately German shepherd who is clearly and visibly intelligent in a way that transcends language. My school years in Australia coincided with a kind of Rex-mania. I remembered news stories about how pet owners would put the show on for their dogs, who would bark and gleefully wag their tails at the screen. Pope Benedict XVI, who was German, was reportedly a fan, and watched it with his brother Georg, who claimed to be friends with a man from the Bavarian city of Regensburg who owned one of the dogs that played Rex. We didn’t have a dog. In our house, the show was for my grandmother and for me. My mother raised me alone, and sometimes worked late. Looking after me became my grandmother’s responsibility, and, in a way, vice versa. Many nights, we would watch “Rex” together while we waited for my mother to come home.

For an elderly woman originally from Shandong, then naturalized in Shanghai, a mostly kinetic show in German about a charismatic, industrious dog was perfect. Unlike me, she couldn’t read the English subtitles. But nobody was under any illusion that that mattered. In Rex, my grandmother and I had a being of pure legibility, one who wordlessly told us exactly what he was doing. (The plots, of course, were finagled so that each case could be solved by something a dog could do.) My grandmother watched with a rather flat affect—the humans sparked very little reaction from her, but when the dog appeared she would always point and make sure I was watching, and remark to me or herself about how smart dogs are.

There is a phrase we like to say to each other when we watch “Inspector Rex.” It’s a construction in Shanghainese, whose elegance and full power can only be glimpsingly translated into English. It’s four words, or, more accurately, characters. Written in simplified Chinese, it is 狗出来了; transcribed phonetically, in our accent, it’s something like Gou tse leh le. Literally, it means “The dog [gou] has come out [tse leh le].” Parsed into more fluid English, you’d say, “The dog is here,” or, most perfectly, something like “There he is.

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