Ten German series to start with: period sagas, Cold War spies, a Neukölln crime family, a sci-fi puzzle and two comedies, one of them about a man who cleans up crime scenes.
For decades German television was known abroad for the Sunday-night procedural. That reputation has not survived the last fifteen years. ARD and ZDF began commissioning longer and riskier serials, pay channels such as Sky and TNT Serie commissioned their own, and Netflix followed with German originals, bringing bigger budgets and an international audience. The series that came out of this have won Emmys and Grimme awards and found viewers well beyond the German-speaking world.
This list doesn't keep to one genre. Four of the ten also appear in our guide to German crime series: Dark, Babylon Berlin, Deutschland 83 and 4 Blocks are too good to leave off either. The rest are period dramas set during the Second World War, in the GDR and at the Habsburg court, an Emmy-winning miniseries about leaving a closed religious community, and two comedies.
1. Dark (2017)
Dir. Baran bo Odar · Germany · Sci-Fi / Mystery / Drama
Netflix's first German-language original opens in the fictional town of Winden, where the disappearance of two children unsettles four families who have lived side by side for generations, within sight of the local nuclear power plant. Baran bo Odar shoots it in a cold, overcast palette, and Louis Hofmann's Jonas Kahnwald gives the series its wounded, watchful centre.
Odar created the show with Jantje Friese, and over three seasons and 26 episodes they built one of the most tightly plotted puzzles in recent television. It rewards the attention people usually save for a long novel, and viewers who keep a notebook beside the sofa are not overdoing it. Dark won the 2018 Grimme-Preis for fiction.
2. Unorthodox (2020)
Dir. Maria Schrader · Germany / US · Drama
Loosely based on Deborah Feldman's 2012 memoir, this four-part miniseries follows Esther "Esty" Shapiro, a young woman who leaves her ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for Berlin. It cuts between the life she has left, with its arranged marriage and its rules, and her new life in Berlin, where she has been told her estranged mother lives. Much of the dialogue is in Yiddish.
Shira Haas plays Esty with great stillness and holds every scene she is in. Maria Schrader won the Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series.
3. Generation War (2013)
Dir. Philipp Kadelbach · Germany · Drama / History / War
Berlin, 1941. Five young friends spend one last evening together before the war separates them: two brothers in uniform, a Jewish tailor, his girlfriend who wants to be a singer, and a nurse. They promise to meet again the following Christmas. Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter then follows each of them into the war across three feature-length episodes.
Philipp Kadelbach's miniseries was the most-watched and most-debated ZDF drama of its decade. It asks how ordinary young people became part of the Nazi war, and it looks at them from the vantage point of their children's generation. Volker Bruch and Tom Schilling lead a strong young cast. The series won the International Emmy for TV Movie or Miniseries and the German Television Award for Best Multi-Part Drama.
4. Babylon Berlin (2017)
Dir. Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, Hendrik Handloegten · Germany · Crime / Drama / History
Berlin, 1929. Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), a police inspector from Cologne who brought the First World War home with him, arrives in the capital on a politically delicate vice investigation. Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), a clerk at police headquarters who grew up in the tenements of Neukölln, dreams of becoming the city's first female homicide detective. Volker Kutscher's Gereon Rath novels supply the frame, and the series fills it with crowded streets, political marches and the Moka Efti dance hall.
Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Hendrik Handloegten wrote and directed it as a team. It was at the time the most expensive non-English-language drama series ever produced, and it ran for five seasons and 48 episodes. It won the German Television Award for Best Series in 2018, and the European Film Awards gave it their first prize for a fiction series a year later. Bruch is also one of the five friends in Generation War, so the two make a strange and rewarding double bill.
5. The Empress (2022)
Dir. Katrin Gebbe, Florian Cossen, Barbara Ott · Germany · Drama / History / Romance
Bavaria, 1853. The young, free-spirited Sisi travels with her older sister Helene to the Austrian court, where Helene is expected to become Empress. When Emperor Franz Joseph I chooses Sisi instead, she is thrust into a Habsburg court governed by protocol and by the will of Archduchess Sophie.
German-speaking audiences know this story from the Romy Schneider films of the 1950s. Die Kaiserin tells it with more energy and a sharper eye for court politics. Devrim Lingnau and Philip Froissant lead, Melika Foroutan is formidable as Sophie, and the series won the 2023 International Emmy for Best Drama Series.
6. How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) (2019)
Dir. Arne Feldhusen, Lars Montag, Mia Spengler, Facundo Scalerandi · Germany · Comedy / Crime
Moritz Zimmermann is a teenage nerd in a small German town who wants his girlfriend back. His plan is to build an online drug shop from his bedroom with his best friend Lenny. The premise is loosely inspired by a real case, and the show tells it in Moritz's own rapid-fire narration.
Maximilian Mundt and Danilo Kamperidis make the friendship at its centre believable, which is why the comedy keeps landing as the stakes rise. Philipp Käßbohrer and Matthias Murmann created it for Netflix, where it ran for four seasons and 24 episodes, and Arne Feldhusen directed more of them than anyone else. In 2020 it won the Grimme-Preis and the German Television Award for Best Comedy Series.
7. Weissensee (2010)
Dir. Friedemann Fromm · Germany · Drama / History
Two East Berlin families sit on opposite sides of the GDR. The Kupfers are loyal to the Stasi, and the other household is one the state keeps under watch. When a young policeman from the first family falls for someone from the second, Friedemann Fromm's ARD saga has its engine, and every family dinner turns into a test of loyalty.
Over four seasons the series is mostly interested in what surveillance does to marriages and to brothers. Florian Lukas, Uwe Kockisch, Jörg Hartmann and Katrin Sass head the ensemble, and the series won the Grimme-Preis.
8. Deutschland 83 (2015)
Dir. Edward Berger, Samira Radsi · Germany · Drama / Thriller
Summer 1983. Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay), a 24-year-old border guard in East Germany, is recruited by the Stasi's foreign intelligence service and sent west under the name Moritz Stamm, as aide-de-camp to a Bundeswehr general who works with NATO on the deployment of Pershing II missiles. One of his handlers is his aunt Lenora (Maria Schrader), a cultural attaché at the East German mission in Bonn. The Cold War is seen from the East for once, and the series plays the culture clash for laughs as often as for tension.
Anna and Jörg Winger created it, and Edward Berger and Samira Radsi directed the eight episodes in parallel with the same crew. It premiered on SundanceTV in 2015 as the first German-language series to air on a US network, with Peter Schilling's "Major Tom (Coming Home)" over the titles, and in 2016 it won the International Emmy for Best Drama Series. Schrader went on to direct Unorthodox, and the story continues in Deutschland 86 and Deutschland 89.
9. Der Tatortreiniger (2011)
Dir. Arne Feldhusen · Germany · Comedy / Drama
Heiko "Schotty" Schotte (Bjarne Mädel) cleans up crime scenes in and around Hamburg. He turns up with his mop and bucket once the police have finished, and each self-contained episode leaves him in one flat, house or office with the people still there: the bereaved, the witnesses, whoever else is left in the building. Despite the title it isn't a crime show. Nobody investigates anything, and the half-hours run on talk, most of it funny and some of it unexpectedly sad.
Every episode was written by Mizzi Meyer, the pen name of the playwright Ingrid Lausund, and directed by Arne Feldhusen, who later directed more of How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) than anyone else. NDR made 31 episodes over seven seasons between 2011 and 2018, and the series won the Grimme-Preis in 2012 and again in 2013. The BBC remade it in 2021 as The Cleaner, with Greg Davies, but the original is the one to see.
10. 4 Blocks (2017)
Dir. Marvin Kren, Oliver Hirschbiegel, Özgür Yıldırım · Germany · Crime / Drama / Thriller
Ali "Toni" Hamady (Kida Khodr Ramadan) runs four blocks of Berlin-Neukölln for his family's Lebanese clan: drugs, protection and quiet diplomacy with the police. His wife Kalila (Maryam Zaree) wants him to go straight and take German citizenship, and he wants the same for the sake of their daughter. The trouble is who would take over: his younger brother Abbas (Veysel Gelin) is next in line and dangerously unpredictable. Latif, Toni's brother-in-law, is played by the rapper Massiv, and Toni brings in Vince (Frederick Lau), a friend from his youth, to help him keep order.
Marvin Kren directed the first season for TNT Serie on the streets of Neukölln and Kreuzberg, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Özgür Yıldırım shared the second, and Yıldırım directed the third. The dialogue moves between German and Arabic. In 2018 Ramadan won the German Television Award for Best Actor and Kren the award for Best Director, and the series won a Grimme-Preis. It is the most violent series on this list, and German critics argued over whether it glamorises the clans, but its family scenes are as good as anything in German crime television.
Where to Start
If you have never watched German television, start with Unorthodox. It runs to four episodes and needs no background. For something to live with for months, Dark is a puzzle told over three seasons and Babylon Berlin a city told over five, and Weissensee follows two families through four. For a laugh, How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) is the easy way in, and Der Tatortreiniger, in half-hour episodes that stand alone, is the odder and quieter one.
The German twentieth century runs through several of them: the Weimar Republic in Babylon Berlin, the war in Generation War, the divided city of Weissensee and the Cold War, seen from the East, in Deutschland 83.
For more crime, our 10 Must-Watch German Crime Series adds Pagan Peak, Bad Banks and Kleo to the four it shares with this list, and our 10 Must-Watch German Films of All Time goes back to the cinema these series grew out of. If you are working through Europe one country at a time, our 10 Must-Watch French Series is a good next stop.
