--- title: "Babylon Berlin" year: 2017 kind: "series" canonical: "https://film.one/tv/babylon-berlin" fi1m_score: 82 critics_reviews: 3 published: "2026-09-17T20:04:51.664451+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T20:05:06.026099+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Babylon Berlin (2017) Created by Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, Hendrik Handloegten · MPA TV-MA · Drama, Crime, Mystery **Fi1m score: 82** · Critics: 3 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* A city dancing as hard as it can so nobody has to look at the calendar > The Weimar crime saga from Tykwer, von Borries and Handloegten is as handsome and as busy as television gets, and Liv Lisa Fries holds it together. The plot takes on more than it can carry, but we did not want to leave its Berlin. ## Synopsis Berlin, 1929. Inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), a war veteran from Cologne who steadies his shaking hands with morphine, is seconded to the city’s vice squad on a discreet errand: recover a pornographic film reel being used to blackmail a Cologne politician. His new partner, Bruno Wolter (Peter Kurth), knows every door in the city and is in no hurry to open them. Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries) types up case files at police headquarters by day and works the floor of the Moka Efti nightclub by night to keep her family fed in a crowded tenement flat. Meanwhile a freight train crosses the Soviet border with a cargo several men in Berlin want badly enough to kill for. ## Review Berlin in 1929, four years before the Weimar Republic ends, and nobody in *Babylon Berlin* knows it. That is the programme’s best idea, and its makers hold to it. Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Hendrik Handloegten created the series and share the writing and directing, adapting Volker Kutscher’s crime novels into something that means to be a police procedural, a political thriller and a portrait of a city at once. The first sixteen episodes arrived as two runs a month apart in the autumn of 2017. It is handsome, busy and often thrilling, and it asks you to hold more plot than it can carry. We recommend it, with that warning attached. The plot begins small. Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) comes from Cologne to recover a film reel, and Bruch plays him closed, a man who hides his shaking hands with morphine rather than let anyone see them. For long stretches he is the least interesting person in his own story. Liv Lisa Fries’s Charlotte Ritter is the reason to keep going. She types at police headquarters by day, works the Moka Efti by night and climbs home to a tenement where too many Ritters sleep in too few beds, and Fries plays all three lives with the same quick, appraising look. She is never once a victim. Uli Hanisch’s production design gives them a city that has been lived in rather than dressed. The police headquarters is a warren of frosted glass and brown corridors; the Moka Efti goes down several floors, each louder and less lawful than the last. Pierre-Yves Gayraud’s costumes do the class work without a word: Charlotte has one good dress and we learn to watch for it. Four cinematographers are credited, Philipp Haberlandt, Christian Almesberger, Frank Griebe and Bernd Fischer, and the surprise is how consistent the look is: brown and yellow interiors under low lamps, streets in grey rain, colour saved for the club. The club is where the programme got us. Early on, a singer in a man’s suit and slicked hair takes the Moka Efti stage and the whole floor falls into the same dance, moving as one to a lyric about ash and dust. Tykwer and Johnny Klimek’s score puts an electronic pulse under the 1929 arrangement, which ought to be a cheat and is not; it makes the club present rather than preserved. We sat up, and then we felt the chill the scene intends, because a crowd that moves in step is a crowd that can be pointed. The series tells you what it is about there, without a line of dialogue. The trouble is everything the plot does around it. A freight train comes over the Soviet border carrying something several parties in Berlin want, and by the middle of the run those parties include Trotskyist exiles, army officers who never accepted the peace, the industrialist Alfred Nyssen (Lars Eidinger, playing wealth as a nervous condition), the gangster Edgar Kasabian (Mišel Matičević) and the political police under August Benda (Matthias Brandt). Alexander Berner, Claus Wehlisch and Antje Zynga cut between these strands with skill, and there are still too many. Around the ninth episode we lost track of who wanted the train and why, and found we did not mind, which is not the compliment it sounds like. Peter Kurth’s Bruno Wolter, Rath’s partner in vice, is the one figure in the machinery who stays legible, and Kurth plays him with a slow, amused patience that nobody else in it matches. What sets it above most period crime is what it refuses. There is no wink at the future. The men who will run Germany in four years barely appear; the dangers here are the army, the Communists and the money. One review we read found it bland, built for export. We see the point in the smoother passages, and we think it misses how much of the series is spent in small rooms watching people count coins. Watch it in German with subtitles if you are given the choice; the voices, Fries’s above all, are half the point. It is an 18 certificate and earns it, with the needle as much as the bedroom. Two episodes a night is about right. Any more and the plot starts to blur. *Fi1m score 82, published 17 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (3) - **Vulture**, Kathryn VanArendonk (90/100, inferred): The critic strongly recommends the series as an epically gripping, byzantine historical drama set in Weimar Berlin that mixes multiple genres with political resonance. She singles out its stylish, propulsive storytelling and timely sense of a world teetering on collapse. [Read](https://www.vulture.com/2020/03/babylon-berlin-season-3-review-please-watch.html) - **The Guardian** (65/100, inferred): The lavish Weimar-era police drama has plenty of contemporary resonance with its depiction of political extremes and debauchery in 1920s Berlin. It benefits from strong plotting and character development but feels somewhat bland and less distinctive in its bid for international appeal. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/nov/06/babylon-berlin-review-political-maelstrom-a-populist-right-on-the-march-sound-familiar) - **Paste**, Allison Keene (90/100, inferred): Babylon Berlin is stunning television and one of TV's best series, a hidden treasure with no filler that immerses viewers in its world. The critic singles out the seamless integration of intimate personal stories with major political movements for praise. [Read](https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/babylon-berlin/babylon-berlin-review) ## Details - **Created by:** Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, Hendrik Handloegten - **Creator:** Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, Hendrik Handloegten - **Director:** Achim von Borries, Hendrik Handloegten, Tom Tykwer - **Writer:** Achim von Borries, Tom Tykwer, Hendrik Handloegten, Khyana El Bitar, Bettine von Borries - **Novel:** Volker Kutscher - **Cinematography:** Philipp Haberlandt, Bernd Fischer, Frank Griebe, Christian Almesberger - **Editor:** Alexander Berner, Antje Zynga, Claus Wehlisch - **Music:** Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek - **Production design:** Uli Hanisch - **Costume design:** Pierre-Yves Gayraud - **Producer:** Michael Polle, Stefan Arndt, Uwe Schott - **Cast:** Volker Bruch as Gereon Rath; Liv Lisa Fries as Charlotte Ritter; Leonie Benesch as Greta Overbeck; Lars Eidinger as Alfred Nyssen; Benno Fürmann as Günter Wendt; Mišel Matičević as Edgar 'The Armenian' Kasabian; Ronald Zehrfeld as Walter Weintraub; Meret Becker as Esther Kasabian - **Certificate (MPA):** TV-MA - **Release (the US):** 13 October 2017 - **Genres:** Drama, Crime, Mystery - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_qN5bFfOTE ## Where to watch in the US - The Roku Channel: add-on, hd - Amazon Prime Video: add-on - Apple TV: add-on, hd - Apple TV: buy, sd - Amazon Prime Video: buy, hd *Checked 2026-09-17.* Also available in: AT, AU, BG, CA, CH, CZ, DE, DK, FI, GB, HR, HU, NO, PL, PT, RO, RS, SE, SI, TR, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - European Film Academy Achievement in Fiction Series Award 2019: European Film Academy Achievement in Fiction Series Award (won) - Bavarian TV Awards 2018: Bavarian TV Awards (won) - Best drama series 2018: Best drama series (won) - Grimme-Preis 2018: Grimme-Preis (won) - Magnolia Award for Best Foreign TV Series 2018: Magnolia Award for Best Foreign TV Series (won) - Romy 2018: Romy (won) ## If you liked this - *M* (1931), Fi1m 94: Berlin police and underworld hunting the same man, made by people who were there — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/m.md) - *Cabaret* (1972): The same city a few years on, watched from the club stage - *Berlin Alexanderplatz* (1980): Fassbinder’s fifteen hours of the same streets, seen from the gutter up - *Deutschland 83* (2015), Fi1m 74: Another German spy story with lighter feet and the same appetite for period pop — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/deutschland.md) - *Boardwalk Empire* (2010), Fi1m 80: Vice, politics and a whole era bought by the yard, American style — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/boardwalk-empire.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/tv/babylon-berlin