Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Beat’ On Amazon Prime, Where A Party Promoter Is Recruited To Become A Spy

It feels like a lot of shows have at least some scene where the protagonists are in a club, dancing to a DJ playing EDM in some form, taking mysterious pills or snorting lines of blow, and generally just letting down their inhibitions. What if one of those people was recruited to be a secret agent? That’s the premise of the German series Beat. Read on to see if it’s worth your while…

BEAT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man stumbles out of a train station and puts on his jacket. He’s definitely high, and it seems like he might pass out in an alleyway next to the train. Then he stumbles down the street and into a place called Club Sonar. It’s 7:34 AM and a rave is still going on.

The Gist: Robert “Beat” Schlag (Jannis Niewöhner) is one of Berlin’s premier party promoters, and co-owns Club Sonar, the city’s leading techno club, with his friend Paul (Hanno Koffler). He knows every DJ, all the drug dealers, and every mover and shaker on the scene. He knows how to fulfill people’s fantasies. His lifestyle is definitely bohemian, staying up all night, waking up at 4 PM, and sleeping with whoever he’s attracted to of any gender.

All of this is why Richard Diemer (Christian Berkel), an agent for European Secret Intelligence, wants to recruit him for a new operation; his handler will be an agent named Emilia (Karoline Herfurth), who is returning from a time away to recover from either a physical or psychological injury (we’re not sure what).

Emilia moves in to recruit Beat after the bodies of two young women are found hanging ceremoniously from the ceiling of the club, and she saves him from the scrutiny of the local police, especially because his jacket pockets were full of blow, which would have gotten him arrested.

He’s reluctant to help, citing the fact that he’s not a rat, but when he follows a weirdo named Jasper (Kostja Ullmann), who accosted Beat at the club right before the bodies were discovered, down to his basement lair, he finds out that there’s more going on than he realized. Jasper is apparently an old acquaintance, having gone to the same orphanage as Beat. However, Beat has no idea who he is. But there’s something sinister going on with Jasper, as we see when someone from his organization goes to find him to return to headquarters.

Our Take: Our thoughts on Beat are mixed. The idea behind the show is interesting, since it involves the techno scene and a man who basically says in voice over that the beat has been in his blood since before he was even born. Also, Jasper spews some stuff about having to deal with evil to know what’s good, or something like that. So there are elements in the show that might lead to some interesting emotional scenes later on in the first season.

But for now, much of what goes on in the first episode does so without a lot of context. We don’t know exactly what operation they’re recruiting him for. Emilia and Richard see the murders as the way in to getting him to become one of their informants. But not knowing what the bigger picture is makes things all the more confusing. We will say that the first episode does a good job of setting up Beat’s lifestyle and showing why he’s not exactly the ideal intelligence agent.

(One note: We watched the screener for this show in its native German, with subtitles. However, Amazon has seen also fit to stream it to its American audiences a version that is dubbed into English with American voice actors, even though the show clearly takes place in Berlin. We vastly prefer the subtitled version, but Amazon is making it tough to find. If you’d prefer to watch the original version, it is available here.)

Sex and Skin: Beat owns an all-night club where everyone’s high and there’s lots of sex going on out in the open. We see skin from basically the first 30 seconds on.

Parting Shot: An extended scene of Jasper dancing to old-fashioned music, among tanks and tubs with preserved bodies in them.

Sleeper Star: We want to know more about Herfurth’s character Emilia, besides the fact that she’s recovering from something and the fact that she’s originally from Minsk.

Most Pilot-y Line: Beat calls Emilia “Jane Bond” after he learns she works for ESI. Also, the recurring joke that no one has heard of it is a little grating.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The show was skating on thin ice to begin with, but the dubbed soundtrack makes Beat even worse. Better to watch other thrillers in their native language rather than this in English.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Beat (English Subtitled Version) on Amazon Prime Video