Bad Banks

Christian Schwochow's Bad Banks launched on ZDF and Arte in February 2018 and ran for two seasons and twelve episodes through 2020. Schwochow directed the whole first season; Christian Zübert took over for the second. The series was developed by Oliver Kienle, who wrote the German feature 4 Kings (2015), and produced by Letterbox Filmproduktion with the Luxembourg-based Iris Productions, and Bad Banks moves between Luxembourg and Frankfurt.

Paula Beer leads the cast. She was twenty-two at the time, and her César-nominated performance in Frantz (2016) had already made her one of the most recognised faces in contemporary German cinema; her Berlinale Silver Bear for Undine (2020) came later, as did Afire (2023), a Silver Bear winner itself. Désirée Nosbusch, a Luxembourgian actress with a long European career, plays the senior managing director who recruits her, and Albrecht Schuch (later in System Crasher and All Quiet on the Western Front) and Tobias Moretti complete the principal cast.

At the 2019 ceremony the series won the Grimme-Preis for Best Fiction Series, the most prestigious prize in German television, and the Bavarian TV Awards gave it Best Director (Schwochow), Best Actress (Beer) and Best Production. It was one of the first shows of the so-called German Quality TV period, which produced Babylon Berlin, Dark, Deutschland 83 and 4 Blocks in the same five-year window, and academic studies of contemporary European television treat it as one of that period's founding works.