Hacker Cinema
Babylon Berlin
2017 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, Hendrik Handloegten
Beneath the decadence of 1929 Berlin, lies an underworld city of sin. Police investigator Gereon Rath has been transferred from Cologne to the epicenter of political and social changes in the Golden Twenties.
7 positive1 mixed2 neutralfrom 10 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
10 comments on Hacker News
Babylon Berlin (seasons 1 and 2) were great.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_Berlin
This show draws some parallels if that's what you seek.
Netflix is screwed.
It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you could find it on Netflix, put it in your DVD queue and in a few days receive the DVD in the mail. Their inventory was really good, (with some exceptions) and the service had pretty fast turnaround. Phase 1.
Then broadband started becoming more available, so streaming became a natural extension. Here's where Netflix faced bigger challenges. Initially, IP owners were happy to sell streaming rights for pennies since they didn't have any idea of the real value. Netflix leveraged this to build up an even bigger catalog that wasn't constrained by the number of DVDs in their inventory.
Netflix started to dabble in producing (and buying) content for their streaming. Good stuff like Stranger Things. The Crown. Dark. Babylon Berlin. And IP owners started raising the prices for renewals for movies and series in their catalogs. Netflix decided to cheap out on the quality of their shows. And they started to cut down on their DVD catalog as well.
Now you have all of the IP owners with their own streaming services, so Netflix will find it really hard to stream anything but the crappiest stuff. And they've shown little ability to consistently produce quality series or movies.
Contrast this with ATV+. Apple knew that it had a huge potential customer base, but that licensing IP wasn't going to be sustainable; whatever they streamed had to be exclusive. So they started slow, trying to replace HBO for high quality content. And they had some meh shows like "See." Not bad, but not HBO. Then "The Morning Show," followed by "Ted Lasso." Now they're starting to get some traction. Having an infinite amount of money always helps, but they became pretty good at saying no. "For All Mankind" grabbed a chunk of sci-fi viewers. Greyhound captured the war nerds. Slowly, carefully, they've been building up a pretty solid catalog. Now you have shows like "Servant," "Slow Horses," "The Mosquito Coast," "Foundation."
Cap it off with a series and a movie that have set ATV+ on par with any streaming service: Severance and Coda.
Now ATV+ will never have the catalog that Disney+ has. They might be fine with that. But where does this leave Netflix? Netflix has no serious movies that could compete for an Oscar. They don't seem to have the ability to create must see TV anymore. Perhaps they're too driven by algorithms to give the viewer what Netflix "thinks" they want? I just can't see a path forward for Netflix as other than crappy shows. Even with their foreign content, they face increased price pressure and competition from the other SVODs.
Danish: I watched The Rain, and Chestnut Man is on my list to watch soon. I'm also interested in Elves and The Killing.
Russian: I loved Road To Calvary and To The Lake, and watched some of Better Than Us and liked it.
German: One of my favorite shows of all time is Babylon Berlin :)
Norwegian: Ragnarok is kinda interesting.
Egyptian: Paranormal is good, and only 5 episodes long.
Spanish: Cathedral of the Sea is interesting, and I loved Ministry of Time - although this one vanished from all online streamings :/
Swedish: The Restaurant is available on Sundance/Star or some other channels. Like Downton Abbey. Just watched a couple episodes, but it was nice
French: Lupin and Les Revenants (The Returned) - although I think the second is not on Netflix now, but somewhere else. Watched it many years ago
Belgium: not fantastic, but Thieves of the Wood is just one season long and enjoyable.
Italian: I liked Curon, although it didn't seem to please too many people, I think?
On my list: Trapped, which is Icelandic.
Cheat: Hinterland - it's made in both English and Welsh
Like the remaster of The Day of the Tentace... The original has a vaguely German Expressionist (from 1920s films) look that I like. The artists of the remaster smoothed out many of the harsh edges, apparently assuming that they were only due to technical limitations. Technical limitations, like in the old movies, influenced the style, sure... but it works the way it was initially created and ignorant "improvements" don't do it any good.
Have a look at the second image (jail), especially the lamps and the grate. They should be more angular in higher resolution, not less. https://rebell.at/artikel/day-of-the-tentacle-bekommt-ein-remake-screenshots-im-vergleich
This kind of modernization can be done right... Jim Burton movies and Babylon Berlin borrowed from German expressionism, especially in certain scenes - often night scenes. Tentacle is somewhere in between - the artists could have taken their inspiration from looking at the Caligari (1920) - Batman (1989) - Babylon Berlin scale and some 30s cartoons.
Disclaimer: I cannot art for shit. I can only look and talk about it.
Babylon Berlin was a action/erotic/murder mistery-filled series on Netflix, with english dubbing. I doubt you can get more "populist" than that. If you mean very specifically a Hollywood-made movie: why should Americans deal with this topic? It is more appropriately made by a society that had more connections to these events.
But even so, you see counter-examples, eg. Jojo Rabbit, which is about a small german town, post-WWII. "trending periods" as a topic of filmmaking changes constantly. See how in the last decade a lot of people cried out about lack of coverage on WWI, and then came "1917" or Battlefield One.
Netflix is musty, as someone said to me. After overthinking, musty indeed is the best term for most of Netflix.
Last movie I saw and liked at Netflix was The two popes. Netflix doesn't carry top series like
- Exit https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9612102/
- Le bureau des légendes https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4063800/
- Okkupert EDIT was/is available https://www.netflix.com/title/80092654
In the US & Canada Netflix has Babylon Berlin https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4378376/ but IMHO it is not up to above three.
Looking forward to be able to watch hbo-europe.com documentaries like
- The Other Side of Everything https://www.othersideofeverything.com/
- Lessons of Love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM-wAlSFHZQ
Native German speaker here. Other recommendations (I learned English this way):
- Watch movies / TV series with (German) subtitles. Recommendations: Dubbed stuff that is easy to digest like e.g. Crime Stuff / Big Bang Theory.
- Or more advanced, German productions: Dark on Netflix; Babylon Berlin; Bad Banks; Stromberg (The Office clone); Tatortreiniger; Tatort.
- Read books like that you might know in your native language: the Little Prince, Harry Potter.
The German series "Babylon Berlin" [1] is a fictive series about the Weimar Republic before the Nazis got to power.
Berlin Alexanderplatz is apparently also about Berlin the 1920s. It is from 1980, by famous director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The entire miniseries is ~15,5 hours long. I have yet to see it before my death...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_Berlin
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Alexanderplatz_(miniseries)
I recommend:
- Dunkle Heimat
- Hummel, Hummel, Mord, Mord
- Der nasse Fisch (based on the TV series Babylon Berlin)
Mad Men didn't even have an audience when it aired (<2 million viewers most episodes), and airs on a network that likely won't exist in 5-6 years (or at least won't be producing new content), so it's not super clear to me what your point is about those shows as evidence of how a network grows. The way a network grows is by producing content people want to watch, whether that's disposable content made to last a minute or content made to last the test of time. HBO isn't growing because people are subscribing to watch Sopranos re-runs.
Past reporting suggests churn in most subscription content services is very low, so your Netflix cancellation may be unusual. I'd also add that exclusive content is one part of the story, but there's also a lot of licensed content that's very good on Netflix as on other services.
But for what it is worth, I would rank the following Netflix originals to be "top tier" within their genre -- some of these genres lend themselves more to rewatching than others, and some are closer to my taste than others, some held up in quality through their run more than others, so in a sense I am ranking shows based on their peak quality --
Orange is the New Black; Bloodline; Stranger Things; The Crown; Gilmore Girls AYITL; The OA; A Series of Unfortunate Events; Mindhunter; The Haunting of Hill House; Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Master of None; Love; Lady Dynamite; Santa Clarita Diet; GLOW; American Vandal; Maniac; Bojack Horseman; F is for Family; Disenchantment; Hilda; Dark; The Rain; Elite; Chef's Table; Making a Murderer; Shot in the Dark; Wormwood; Wild Wild Country; Salt Fat Acid Heat; Queer Eye; The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell; My Next Guest Needs No Introduction; Lilyhammer; Terrace House; Alias Grace; The End of the Fucking World; Collateral; Wanderlust; Longmire; Black Mirror; Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
In addition to these, the following shows are Netflix originals in my region, indicating that although someone else initially funded them, Netflix bought them for exclusive distribution here, and also meet the above requirements:
Babylon Berlin; Bodyguard; Casé; Crashing; Cuckoo; Derry Girls; The Great British Baking Show; Happy!; Happy Valley; The Investigator; Peaky Blinders; River.
I have pretty broad taste in TV and watch a lot of TV while I am programming or running data analysis, so maybe the breadth of stuff I include here is surprising to most. But to the extent your post is a useful anecdote about how Netflix has no great shows, I'm responding to your challenge to "Name one show" that would meet that criteria.
(These are TV shows only, not films. I haven't really liked many Netflix original films although there are a few I would say are great, like Okja and Roma)