Babylon Berlin at 38 million Euros is the most expensive German television series ever. I like to think the CGI recreation of Alexanderplatz is authentic of the late 1920s. It does look like it presently does but with the fountain removed and cleaned up.
The first episode starts off with a train heist with many parties having a vested interest in this train arriving to Germany from Russia. The show's central conceit.
It would be cheeky to say this is Cabaret with murder and porn. It is set in the late 1920s Berlin, a city that is a melting pot and at a crossroads of many political factions. We know which political ideology will come out as the master.
We follow Gereon Rath, a driven and ambitious police inspector from Cologne. A veteran of the first world war, he might be suffering from shell shock but hiding it. He has a strict Catholic upbringing. His fellow officer is suspicious as to what he is doing in the vice division. We see the police raiding a porn shoot, some people are concerned that a film reel has fallen into the wrong hands. There is a hint that child pornography is involved.
We learn that Rath is not an uptight bore, he likes a good dance which includes running up the wall and doing a backflip. Looks like he might be a lapsed Catholic.
In a Berlin rampant with post war poverty and hyperinflation we also come across Charlotte Ritter, she is getting ready to go to work, she needs to get rent money by the end of the night. Is she a prostitute? We see her go to the police headquarters to look for any work going for the day. Her green hat gets the attention of someone and she catalogues murders. Charlotte bumps into Rath but I suspect at night she needs to use her glamour to get enough money together so that her family do not end up on the streets.
The first episode sets down the marker. It is more than a seedy, noirish crime mystery that will reveal the underbelly of Berlin. It wants to be a sprawling epic, this train heading somewhere in the middle of the night hints at an Edge of Darkness type conspiracy thriller.