4 Blocks

Marvin Kren's 4 Blocks launched on TNT Serie in May 2017 and ran for three seasons until 2019. The series won the Grimme-Preis and the Deutscher Fernsehpreis (German Television Award) for Best Drama Series in successive years, and is widely considered the moment German prestige television caught up with what Scandinavian and British TV had been doing for the previous decade.

Ali Toni Hamady (Kida Khodr Ramadan, in a star-making lead performance) runs four city blocks of Berlin's Neukölln district for his family's Lebanese clan, drug distribution, protection, quiet relationships with sympathetic police officers. He wants out, for his wife and daughter; his older brother Abbas (Massiv, the rapper, in a remarkable acting debut) and his volatile brother-in-law Latif do not. The series moves between the family's quiet domestic sphere and the violence required to maintain its commercial position, with Frederick Lau as the undercover cop infiltrating the operation.

The series was unusually careful in its depiction of the actual Lebanese-clan culture in Berlin's working-class districts, drawing on academic and journalistic research into the city's so-called Großfamilien rather than relying on tabloid-stereotype shorthand. The show launched its cast into other significant German projects (Ramadan to Dogs of Berlin; Lau across multiple festival features) and demonstrated that German-language drama could compete in the international streaming market.