TV review: Babylon Berlin reminds me of Peaky Blinders but I wasn't instantly hooked
Ernst Gennat (Udo Samel), Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), August Benda (Matthias Brandt) in Babylon Berlin
(Sky Atlantic and NOW TV app) brings to mind.
Soldiers coming to terms with the trauma of World War One, intrigue, showy set-pieces, mood, music and attitude. The two shows have a lot in common.
The difference is that Peaky Blinders had me hooked from episode one. Babylon Berlin? Not so much. There are too many threads in the opening hour. A traumatised detective from Cologne is sent to late 1920s Berlin chasing a blackmailer. A train from the Soviet Union is hijacked. A poor typist works nights at a riotous jazz club. The owner of the nightclub is somehow involved with the blackmailer. The poor typist meets the traumatised detective in police headquarters where she has a part-time job.
You can see this is going somewhere. Given this is Berlin in 1929, and there are four seasons of available on NOW, it’s obvious there will be Nazis and soon. But there is something missing and I think it might be Cillian Murphy. Or Helen McCrory. Or a few other actors in  who made it compelling viewing from the start.
We’re not given enough time to connect with the characters at the start of season one in Babylon Berlin, because the action keeps jumping from thread to thread of the storyline, as if that’s the key to suspense.
I always think intrigue is wondering what happens to a character you care about, good or bad. But the detective here, Gereon Rath, feels thin and shallow in comparison to Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby. He’s all vulnerability, no malice.
The poorly paid typist, Charlotte Ritter, has more about her. She’s our window into the deprivation of 1920s Berlin, living in a tenement building, four generations of her family squeezed into beds in a freezing flat. There’s a lot more to learn about her than is revealed in the first two episodes, and she’s the reason I’ll keep watching.
started in 2017, and the reviews suggest that it gets better over time, if you give it a chance. And it’s time to give shows more of a chance. There just isn’t good telly around at the moment to assume that there is something better out there.
So I’ll hang on to find out what is going on with the blackmail plot that seems to involve Stalin and Berlin crime bosses.
I’ll also hang on because looks great. The city is gleaming, buzzing, modern; the nightclub set-pieces are thrilling and sexy and the Nazis must have hated everything about this world. There is even a cameo by Bryan Ferry, which sits with a stylish playfulness that radiates through the gloom.
Hopefully, I’ll feel a better connection with the characters after a few more episodes. It’s a shame because German dramas like and are particularly good at drawing you into the lead characters So I’ll stick with for now and let you know how it went in a couple of weeks.
