How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)

Philipp Käßbonn's How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) launched on Netflix in May 2019 and was nominated for the International Emmy for Best Comedy Series. The series ran for four seasons until 2024 and consolidated Netflix Germany's commitment to local-language original production. The show was based loosely on the actual case of Maximilian Schmidt, a German teenager who built one of the largest online drug-sale operations on the dark web from his suburban-Leipzig bedroom in the early 2010s.

Moritz Zimmermann (Maximilian Mundt), a teenage nerd in the small fictional German town of Rinseln, tries to win back his ex-girlfriend Lisa (Lena Klenke) (who has fallen in with a different friend group during her summer abroad) by becoming, with his best friend Lenny (Danilo Kamperidis), Europe's largest online drug dealer. The series follows the operation across its near-comedic origins, its slow drift into actual seriousness, and the increasingly difficult relationships with school, parents, friends and law enforcement.

The series operates simultaneously as broad teenage comedy, German contemporary-school period reconstruction, and increasingly ethical investigation of how rapidly an internet-business operation outgrows its protagonists' capacity to manage it. The performances of the two teenage leads are particularly committed, Mundt's central performance especially. The series became one of the most internationally exported recent German-language productions, particularly in Latin American and Spanish-speaking markets.