Babylon Berlin (TV Series, 2017 – )

Last night Begoña and I started watching the first two episodes of Babylon Berlin.

From Wikipedia: Babylon Berlin is a German period drama television series which premiered on 13. October 2017 on Sky 1, a German-language entertainment channel broadcast by Sky Deutschland. The first season is made up of eight episodes and is set in the Berlin of the 1920s. It is based on books by Volker Kutscher, the plots of which span from 1929 to 1934. The protagonist is police inspector Gereon Rath, who has been transferred from the city of Cologne to the capital. The episodes were directed by three directors in cooperation (as opposed to a single episode director): Tom Tykwer, Hendrik Handloegten and Achim von Borries. All three wrote the screenplay. For the first time in history of German TV, German public broadcaster ARD and pay TV channel Sky co-produced the series. As part of the arrangement, Sky broadcast the series first and ARD will broadcast it on free-to-air television around a year later. Babylon Berlin is the most expensive non-English language drama series ever produced. Netflix purchased broadcast rights for the United States. A third season is in the making.

Summary: Spring 1929. A metropolis in turmoil. From economy to culture, politics to the underworld – everything is in the grip of radical change.

Speculation and inflation are already tearing away at the foundations of the still young Weimar Republic. Growing poverty and unemployment stand in stark contrast to the excesses and indulgence of the city’s night life and its overflowing creative energy.

Gereon Rath, a young police inspector from Cologne, is transferred to Berlin in order to solve a criminal case – a porno ring run by the Berlin Mafia. What at first glance appears to be simply a matter of extortion soon reveals itself to be a scandal that will forever change the lives of both Gereon and his closest associates.

Together with stenotypist Charlotte Ritter and his partner Bruno Wolter, Rath is confronted with a tangled web of corruption, drug dealing, and weapons trafficking, forcing him into an existential conflict as he is torn between loyalty and uncovering the truth. And we are left wondering: in this story, who is friend and who is foe?

With the political unrest spurred by May Day demonstrations and rising National Socialism, even an institution like the “Rote Burg,” Berlin’s police headquarters and the centre of democracy and the constitutional state, is increasingly becoming the melting pot of a democracy whose days are numbered. (Source: Official website)