4 Blocks Zero

4 Blocks ran for three seasons on TNT Serie between 2017 and 2019, won the Grimme-Preis and the German Television Award, and is still one of the reference points for German crime television. 4 Blocks Zero, released weekly on HBO Max from September 2026, goes back to the beginning. Billed as the first German HBO Original released worldwide, it is produced by Wiedemann & Berg, the company behind the original, and directed by Özgür Yıldırım, who also worked on the parent series, with Hüseyin Tabak.

The setting is 1990s Berlin, decades before the Neukölln empire of the original series. A Lebanese family arrives with nothing and is held in place by Duldung, the tolerated-stay status that allows people to remain but not to work or plan. Tariq Al-Saies plays Ibrahim Mansour, with Tareq Nassery as the young Ali "Toni" Hamady and Soufiane El Mesaudi and Rami Fadel Khalaf as his brothers. The writing team includes Bernd Lange and Hassan Akkouch, who acted in the original, and the series keeps its predecessor's mix of German and Arabic and its feel for the city's street level.

Prequels usually look back to explain a legend. This one is more interested in the conditions: what a country's asylum system does to a family and a neighbourhood over years. Critical reception was still forming at the time of writing, but for anyone who watched Toni Hamady run his four blocks, it fills in the history behind them.