Far from the eyes of Emmy voters or the digital gremlins compiling streaming Top 10 lists, there is a series — a German period drama, of all things — that a small core of aficionados would argue is the world’s best television show.
Some of their fondness may have to do with absence. It has been more than four years since a new season of “Babylon Berlin” became available in the United States. And the first three seasons, which resided formerly on Netflix, moved this year to MHz Choice, a boutique streamer of international series and films whose (unreported) subscription figures would probably constitute a good morning’s uptick for Netflix.
So if you are part of the cult — tracking the right subreddit, commiserating with a Facebook friend group of the requisite sophistication — it is a very big deal that the 12-episode fourth season of “Babylon Berlin,” shown in Germany in 2022, is finally premiering on MHz Choice in the United States on Tuesday. (To answer the immediate questions: $7.99 a month, seven-day free trial, and the full season will be up by July 30.)
Based on historical mystery novels by the German writer Volker Kutscher, the show is a sleek, louchely sexy blend of police procedural, love story, Freudian melodrama and expensively rendered costume epic. All of the elements (with the occasional exception of the heavy psychological symbolism) are juggled with finesse by the show’s creator-writer-directors, Achim von Borries, Henk Handloegten and Tom Tykwer. (Bettine von Borries and Khyana el Bitar are also credited as writers in Season 4.)
The balls stay in the air with the mesmerizing rhythm of one of the cabaret acts at the show’s fictional nightclub, Moka Efti; the effect can be, to use the favorite descriptor among “Babylon Berlin” fans, addictive. The series — and the fourth season in particular, which has a story line involving the gathering of Berlin’s criminal gangs — has been compared to “M,” the great 1931 thriller by the German director Fritz Lang. But a better comparison would be to Lang silents like “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler” and “Spies,” intricately assembled thrillers that are some of the most deluxe entertainments ever put on film.
It helps, of course, that the place and time the show inhabits are Berlin in the Weimar era of the 1920s and early ’30s, a ready-made backdrop of artistic, cultural and sexual ferment in a city headed toward political and social catastrophe. The action hopscotches from police labs to the soundstages of expressionist films, from munitions factories to beer halls, from baronial manors to squalid tenements, with a studious devotion to the quality and evocativeness of costumes, sets and locations.
Season 4 jumps ahead to New Year’s Eve in 1930, a little over a year after Season 3 ended amid the chaos of the stock market crash. Newsreel footage of bread lines and of angry crowds of the unemployed is used as a counterpoint to scenes of the show’s characters joining in the celebrations as 1931 begins.
In a season-long motif, Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), the former prostitute who has worked her way onto the police homicide squad, happily dances down the street to a peppy new tune, “A Day Like Gold” (actually sung by the contemporary German jazz singer Max Raabe). Later she will compete in a dance marathon, and she will end the season hoofing to “A Day Like Gold” once again, proclaiming, “Tomorrow is tomorrow, and now is now, and now I want to dance.” The obviousness of the metaphor is mitigated by our knowledge of how completely the world is about to burn.
The new season is typically replete with story lines. On the crime drama side, the murder of a civil servant spurs an investigation of the city’s ringvereine, criminal gangs with connections to boxing clubs. On the social history side, Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), the police detective and former heroin addict who is Ritter’s on-and-off-again love interest, is enmeshed with the SA, the brown-shirted Nazi paramilitary.
Around those central threads, there are also plots involving a secret society carrying out extrajudicial trials and executions; Ritter’s hard-boiled sister, Toni (Irene Bohm), becoming a murder suspect and going on the run; the continued tribulations of the liberal journalist Katelbach (Karl Markovics), which constitute a self-contained spy thriller; and the arrival in Berlin of an American Jewish gangster, Abraham Goldstein (Mark Ivanir), in search of a diamond stolen from his father. (The season is based on the third novel in Kutscher’s series, “Goldstein.”)
There is even more going on than in previous seasons (the first two were eight episodes each), and while the show is as watchable as ever, the action does not stay as sharply in focus as before — the strands still weave together in credible and entertaining fashion, but the individual story lines do not carry the same dramatic and emotional weight. They do not demand your attention quite as insistently.
There is also an implicit question that begins to weigh on the series in the new season: What happens when the Nazis take over? As long as they remain on the outside, in conflict with the police, army and government, the universe of the show can be one in which most of the characters, most of the time, will act based on rational, relatable motives. Once the historical calculus changes, however, the dramatic calculus of the show will have to change as well, and it seems likely that the tone and structure will need to shift significantly for the show to remain believable. (A fifth season has been ordered; Kutscher’s most recent novel, the ninth in the series, is set in 1937.)
The show’s source material is usually referred to as the Gereon Rath series; Rath is central to the action as the lead detective in the most significant cases, and his mental trauma from his service in World War I — he’s the shattered man of the modern age — is the running theme. But what ties the TV series together, supplying the melancholy yet irrepressible melody at its center, is Fries’s performance as the indomitable Ritter, and that is especially true in Season 4. With her pixieish expressiveness, Fries is equally adept at playing a comic-book action heroine and a situationally ethical justice warrior — a character whose fluidity suits her for the perils of her era.
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