Dogs of Berlin

Christian Alvart's Dogs of Berlin launched on Netflix in December 2018 as the platform's second German-language original after Dark. The series consolidated Alvart, an established German genre director (Antibodies, Pandorum), as one of the most internationally exported showrunners in contemporary German prestige drama. Felix Kramer and Fahri Yardim, in the central pair of detectives, anchor the series's ten-episode first season.

When a Turkish-German football star is murdered on the eve of a critical World Cup qualifier between Germany and Turkey, two Berlin detectives are assigned to the case. Erol Birkan (Yardim) is a Turkish-German Berlin native with deep neighbourhood ties; Kurt Grimmer (Kramer) is an undercover officer with a complicated past among the city's neo-Nazi football-fan groups. The investigation moves between the football world, the Turkish-German community, and the German far-right neighbourhoods that the World Cup match has stirred up.

The series's commitment to the actual ethnic-political geography of contemporary Berlin (the Wedding-Neukölln-Kreuzberg-Reinickendorf axis) produced a distinctive register that few earlier German prestige series had attempted. Niko von Glasow's score and the production design's commitment to the actual football-supporters' culture of late-2010s Berlin established the show's continuing reception. A second season followed in 2024.