Deutschland 83

Edward Berger and Anna Winger's Deutschland 83 launched in 2015 as the first German-language series ever to air on American television, debuting on Sundance Channel and SundanceTV. The series won the Peabody Award and was nominated for the International Emmy for Best Drama Series; it consolidated Anna Winger, an American writer based in Berlin, as one of the most internationally significant German-language television creators (later Unorthodox) and Berger as the director who would later direct All Quiet on the Western Front.

Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay), a young East German border guard, is recruited by the Stasi in the summer of 1983 and sent undercover into a West German military base during the height of Cold War tensions over the deployment of Pershing II missiles. He poses as the aide-de-camp to a senior West German general and is required to extract NATO intelligence, and to navigate the personal consequences of an extended undercover identity. Maria Schrader plays his ruthless Stasi handler aunt; Sylvester Groth plays the East German intelligence chief; Sonja Gerhardt is Annett, his East German girlfriend.

The series's commitment to early-1980s historical detail (the actual Able Archer 83 NATO exercise that nearly triggered nuclear war, the Pershing II protests across West Germany, the 1980s synth-pop soundtrack) produced a register that no other recent Cold War drama has equalled. Two further seasons followed (Deutschland 86, Deutschland 89), each set later in the Cold War's collapse; the original 1983 season remains the canonical entry.