You’re dabbling in Blue Planet II, in Versace, maybe a little High Maintenance, but what you want is a big immersive narrative to sink your teeth into. (I need a new show—that peak TV refrain.) Well, thanks to German television, it’s here. The 16-part German period drama Babylon Berlin, which starts streaming on Netflix today, is lavish, epic, dizzyingly complex, and (through the four episodes sent to me early) as satisfying as anything I’ve seen in months. It’s the most bingeable new drama since The Crown.
It’s also similarly expensive. One of the immediate pleasures of this sprawling crime story set in 1929 Weimar Republic Berlin—which is full of unknown-to-me, hugely talented German actors and has as thickly braided a plot as a Tolstoy novel—is the millions thrown at the screen (it’s reportedly the most expensive German-language show ever made). Most of the production was filmed on location in Berlin, and the long tracking exteriors along cobbled streets with vintage cars, passenger trams, and scamps begging for coins are dazzling. We’re treated to busy Alexanderplatz, squalid tenements with coin-operated lights, coal-fired trains that screech and belch smoke, and bustlingly sexy nightclubs full of pristine Bauhaus designs. Weimar was a famously hectic, louche, and creative period, and Babylon gives it a gorgeous sheen.
The characters draw you in as well. Our hero is a war-traumatized, morphine-addicted police inspector, Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), visiting from Cologne, who begins to uncover a pornography blackmail scheme. There’s also a scruffy cadre of Trotskyites, a shadowy cabal of organized crime, some proto-Nazi police types, and an impoverished, scrappy young police assistant Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries, Germany’s answer to Marion Cotillard) who makes the most of Berlin’s debauched nightlife.
Sixteen episodes is a long haul—but the ones I watched ticked along at a pulpy, pleasurable pace, and also made time for surprises (a gaga nightclub performance from a cross-dressing jazz singer, an ecstatic drunken improvisational dance at a beer hall). The show has been a ratings smash in Germany and the U.K., and, since it’s based on a series of novels by Volker Kutscher, it has much more room to run (a new season is in the works now). When it comes to immersive drama, foreign language shows are on the march—see recent examples Dark (Germany), La Mante (France), and Gomorrah (Italy). To which I say: Vive la Europe!
