David Budd can stand by for hours, without emotion. He will see everything, hear everything, register every little thing that happens around him. Every whisper, every look, every door that remains closed for a moment too long. He is the best, so he has been entrusted with the security of the British Home Secretary, the wife has many enemies. But what if he is one of them?

Six episodes have the British series "Bodyguard", and until the last one is never quite sure whether her hero does not really want the evil. David Budd is like a robot programmed to protect, but always a moment before the short. Before he went to the police, he was a soldier in Afghanistan, much has broken down in him. Interior Minister Julia Montague (Keely Hawes), a hardliner with a restrictive anti-terrorist program and boundless ambition, stands for everything he despises. Maybe his true mission is to stop her.

With "Bodyguard" by author Jed Mercurio, the BBC has achieved the best ratings for a series in ten years this year, with up to eleven million people turned on every Sunday. A TV event to which everyone had an opinion and at least one theory of who really conspired against whom. The hype was as gigantic as justified.

Nobody has any scruples

Every week a new twist, sometimes two or three - nothing is, it seems, no one is to be trusted. For years, Mercurio's series "Line of Duty" (hidden here on pay-TV station 13th Street) has known the audience about the hopeless fight against police corruption. "Bodyguard", available in Germany on October 24 on Netflix, now takes on the political elite. Because here everyone is still much, much more corrupt.

Whether interior minister, prime minister, secret service chief or parliamentary managing director - everyone has something to hide in "bodyguard", no one has scruples. The moral standards are on the level of "House of Cards", only that "Bodyguard" is even faster, more exciting, even more cunning - a political thriller, crossed again and again with breathless action. David Budd, played with irony by the former "Game of Thrones" star Richard Madden, sometimes seems like a postmodern James Bond, if ever his loyalty could be questioned.

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"Bodyguard": The security risk is next to you

Already the first 20 minutes of the first episode, filmed completely in the confines of a train on his perhaps last journey, are among the most packed with what television has produced in recent years. One knows the ingredients: the nervous conductor, the suspicious man in the train toilet, the heroic fellow traveler. But every viewer expectation, every cliché is filmed, taken apart and reassembled until nothing is planable and expectable.

It can not come any better than the spectacular first sequence, you think, but that too is just an expectation that is reversed. Whenever things get a bit calmer, chaos breaks out from somewhere. In each episode there is at least one scene that takes your breath away; in the sixth and last episode there are so many that you want to recommend an oxygen device.

Theresa May is not a fan

"Bodyguard" usually moves to the very edge of all probability and credibility. The mere fact that an ex-soldier with such obvious post-traumatic stress disorder without hesitation to the innermost minister of the Interior Minister is called, should be rather impossible in reality. Well, hopefully.

It does not do much either way, the constant stream of wild intrigue and conspiracies takes you too far to worry too much about occasional logical mistakes.

In the UK, however, not everyone was enthusiastic. Prime Minister Theresa May, herself Minister of the Interior, has shut down after 20 minutes, they say. She would rather relax watching television, she said. What that says about their judgment is another question.

"Bodyguard". Season 1, starting on October 24th on Netflix