The Empress

The Empress (Die Kaiserin) premiered on Netflix on 29 September 2022. Created by Katharina Eyssen and directed by Katrin Gebbe and Florian Cossen, the series is a German-language Netflix original produced by Moovie — the company behind Dark and How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast). It became the second-most-watched series on the platform worldwide in its opening fortnight and the seventh most popular non-English series of 2022, accumulating over 150 million hours streamed.

Devrim Lingnau plays Elisabeth of Bavaria — Sisi — in a performance that anchors the series in something more psychologically grounded than the mid-century Romy Schneider films that established the character in popular memory. Philip Froissant plays Franz Joseph I, and Svenja Jung is cast against type as the elder sister Helene, whose expectations are overturned by Sisi's unplanned elevation. Melika Foroutan brings commanding authority to Archduchess Sophie, the true power at the Habsburg court. Directors Gebbe and Cossen give the production a visual language that is handsome rather than reverential, allowing the period setting to frame contemporary questions about female autonomy and institutional constraint.

The series was renewed for a second season, which premiered on Netflix in November 2024, and a third and final season was commissioned in January 2025. The Empress arrived as part of a broader resurgence of German-language prestige drama on Netflix, following Dark and Barbarians, and demonstrated that period drama could attract the same global audiences as crime and genre series from the country's streaming output.