By Dexter "Box-Office" Reel
Thirteen years is a long time to make a television show. It's long enough, apparently, to watch the fiction start catching up to the headlines.
"Babylon Berlin," the sprawling German drama that pulled audiences into the smoke, sequins and simmering menace of 1920s Berlin, is ending its run with a final season that arrives at one of the darkest hinges in modern history: Adolf Hitler's rise to power. According to the Guardian, the show's creators say they never anticipated, when they began, how closely the fragility of Weimar-era democracy would come to resemble the present.
That's the trick of good historical drama — it doesn't predict the future so much as it makes the past legible again. "Babylon Berlin" built its reputation on precisely that: lavish set pieces, jazz-club decadence and a police procedural spine, all wrapped around the slow-motion collapse of a democratic experiment. The Guardian reports the show's German makers have watched, in the years since they started filming, as democracies from the United States to Hungary to South Korea came under pressures they say they could not have imagined at the outset.
It's worth being honest about what we know here: the Guardian's reporting is the sole source for the creators' reflections quoted above, and this piece leans on that account rather than independent interviews. But the underlying fact isn't in dispute — this is a show ending after more than a decade, at the exact historical moment its story was always building toward.
For a series that made its name turning a doomed republic into gorgeous, propulsive television, going out on Hitler's ascent isn't just tidy plotting. It's the whole argument the show was making, delivered one last time.
Loved it, hated it, or wasted my afternoon — here's which: this one earns its ending.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."