‘Babylon Berlin’ Review: Dancing While the World Begins to Burn
Far from the eyes of Emmy voters or the digital gremlins compiling streaming Top 10 lists, there is a series — a German period drama, of all things — that a small core of aficionados would argue is the world’s best television show.
Some of their fondness may have to do with absence. It has been more than four years since a new season of “Babylon Berlin” became available in the United States. And the first three seasons, which resided formerly on Netflix, moved this year to MHz Choice, a boutique streamer of international series and films whose (unreported) subscription figures would probably constitute a good morning’s uptick for Netflix.
So if you are part of the cult — tracking the right subreddit, commiserating with a Facebook friend group of the requisite sophistication — it is a very big deal that the 12-episode fourth season of “Babylon Berlin,” shown in Germany in 2022, is finally premiering on MHz Choice in the United States on Tuesday. (To answer the immediate questions: $7.99 a month, seven-day free trial, and the full season will be up by July 30.)
Based on historical mystery novels by the German writer Volker Kutscher, the show is a sleek, louchely sexy blend of police procedural, love story, Freudian melodrama and expensively rendered costume epic. All of the elements (with the occasional exception of the heavy psychological symbolism) are juggled with finesse by the show’s creator-writer-directors, Achim von Borries, Henk Handloegten and Tom Tykwer. (Bettine von Borries and Khyana el Bitar are also credited as writers in Season 4.)
The balls stay in the air with the mesmerizing rhythm of one of the cabaret acts at the show’s fictional nightclub, Moka Efti; the effect can be, to use the favorite descriptor among “Babylon Berlin” fans, addictive. The series — and the fourth season in particular, which has a story line involving the gathering of Berlin’s criminal gangs — has been compared to “M,” the great 1931 thriller by the German director Fritz Lang. But a better comparison would be to Lang silents like “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler” and “Spies,” intricately assembled thrillers that are some of the most deluxe entertainments ever put on film.
It helps, of course, that the place and time the show inhabits are Berlin in the Weimar era of the 1920s and early ’30s, a ready-made backdrop of artistic, cultural and sexual ferment in a city headed toward political and social catastrophe. The action hopscotches from police labs to the soundstages of expressionist films, from munitions factories to beer halls, from baronial manors to squalid tenements, with a studious devotion to the quality and evocativeness of costumes, sets and locations.
