The Man Without a Memory is a genre in itself.

In the six-part series "The Tourist" it's a car driver who can't remember anything after an accident.

The Irishman was just out and about in Australia's panoramic landscape, flooded with sunlight and made for camera drones, and it was thought that he would definitely be annoyed in the summer of 2022: why travel Down Under when you can now also speed through bone-dry desert landscapes in Central Europe?

Now he's in the Cooper Springs hospital, and the agitated, ill-prepared village police officer Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald from "Patti Cake$") asks him tricky questions like his name.

He has also forgotten his name

He would like to know that too.

Which is why the nameless hunk (Jamie Dornan of Death in Belfast and Fifty Shades of Grey) - fortunately not too severely confined to a wheelchair - left the hospital at first opportunity without reporting to the police and went to a bar in Burnt Ridge: The date of an appointment is written on a piece of paper that Chambers found in his pocket.

Let's see who's coming.

An explosive tryst later, our man at least knows that his life is in danger, with the waitress Luci Miller (Shalom Brune-Franklin) he has a companion who promises to help him with the further search and maybe also emotionally.

He also received a call from the underworld.

That can be worked with – if the duo finds the caller buried alive in time.

So speed: In the screenplay by Harry and Jack Williams ("The Missing", "Rellik") there are phases of rest, which are enforced by copulating turtles on the only road through the outback, refusers playing chess or a sandstorm grinding through the scenery.

But the chase that begins with "The Tourist" - truck against small car - is a promise that the eight-part series keeps to the end: It must never be boring - not even in the dialogues.

The BBC production, set up by directors Daniel Nettheim and Chris Sweeney, is stylistically based on bizarre series such as "Fargo" - the policewoman Helene Chambers, emphatically not (yet) corresponding to the beauty ideal of Hollywood, could easily be an Australian relative of the American investigative specialist Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman) from season one.

She turns out to be the secret weapon of the series.

Because Chambers, lovingly drawn and played even better by Danielle Macdonald, embarks on her own self-discovery trip in "The Tourist".

As our memoryless man searches for his name and uncovers a story he wishes he hadn't discovered, Officer Chambers undergoes a dramatically accelerated process of discovery.

She is engaged to the perpetually offended Ethan (Greg Larsen), who constantly tells her how little she has to report physically and professionally and sends her to weight-watching classes.

The cast also includes: a villain with a full beard who doesn't need any tutoring in "Body Positivity", appears with pastoral grandeur and soon trades his bouquet of flowers for a pump-action gun (played with great stage presence by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, who plays the detective in "Trapped" and mentally ill head of government knows in "The Minister");

a wiry millionaire who really needs to ditch the mind-expanding stuff in his thermos (Alex Dimitriades); and Detective Inspector Lachlan Rogers (Damon Herriman), the most legendary of all detectives from the next big city, working alongside, rather than alongside, Chambers the Nameless chasing.

Rogers seems odd at first when he keeps interrupting his work to make the most banal phone calls to his wife.

Only later does one notice - earlier as Sergeant Rodney Lammon (Kamil Ellis), who receives Rogers in the outback and hopes to dust off some career tips - the sad background of his supposed negligence.

But what do you do when you suddenly recognize many things that have already happened in your life as wrong?

It's one of those questions that Rogers, Chambers and, increasingly, The Man Without a Memory munch on as the entertaining, often hilariously humorous thriller The Tourist swings from one unpredictable twist to the next.

The Tourist

runs today at 10:15 p.m. on ZDF.