#Tv's babylon 9 tv

How many times have you watched an American TV drama that dragged on well past the point of your engagement? Across the showвЂ™s first 28 episodes, only one installment of Babylon Berlin runs over 50 minutes long, and itвЂ™s the third season finale - a wholly acceptable time to have a longer-than-usual episode. That momentum is what I wish I could force prestige TV makers in the US to see in Babylon Berlin. But where Game of Thrones too often let those meetings descend into circuitous games of realpolitik, Babylon Berlin uses its storyline collisions to keep moving things forward. Every time a character in one storyline opens their door to suddenly see characters from another storyline, it gives me the giddy thrill I felt when, say, Tyrion met Daenerys on Game of Thrones all those years ago. Babylon Berlin follows dozens of characters in and around 1929 Berlin, then lets their storylines collide and crash into each other in fascinating ways.

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(The Gereon Rath books, by Volker Kutscher, are even being translated into English now!) The two series are similarly expensive, with Babylon Berlin being the most expensive TV production in German history. Like the HBO behemoth, Babylon Berlin is based on a popular book series that became megapopular after the TV show was a hit. The series I keep wanting to compare Babylon Berlin to is Game of Thrones.

Plus, did I mention that every episode is under 50 minutes? And paced like a lightning bolt? Oh, and the dream sequences, how did I not mention the dream sequences? Or the incredibly impressive and elaborate stunt work! If you called Babylon Berlin вЂњGermanyвЂ™s Game of Thrones,вЂќ you wouldnвЂ™t be wrong (And sometimes itвЂ™s a musical?) The long, slow-burn flirtation between Gereon and Charlotte is one of the best will-they/wonвЂ™t-theys IвЂ™ve ever seen. But even Gereon and Charlotte do awful things in the name of their own self-interest.

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Broadly speaking, Babylon Berlin is about the challenge of ever stopping the slow slide into fascism, because the full picture is often hard to see, and those who scream about it are written off as paranoiacs. Unlike a lot of stories set in Germany during this era, it takes several episodes for Hitler to even be mentioned (and only once across the first two seasons!), and then a seemingly eternal stretch of time after that for a swastika to show up.ДЄnd yet the overall sweep of the show is vintage film noir: The heroes, Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) and Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), take down the bad guys they can capture or sideline, all the while being forced by those above them in the chain of command to let the real villains walk. Crucially, the audience knows this already, while the characters think their system of government is shaky but fundamentally salvageable. The German democracy is on its last legs, about to be swept aside by Hitler and the Nazis.

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Elsewhere there's music from Nina Simone and Lisa Miller plus a rare Nick Lowe track.Some small part of me wants to take everybody who makes so-called вЂњprestigeвЂќ American television and force them to watch Babylon Berlin, a megabudget German series that is so much better than just about any other major drama being produced today.ДЄcross three seasons, the series - which is available in the US on Netflix - tells complicated stories about police officers solving twisty, noir-inflected cases driven by strange and hidden conspiracies in 1929 Berlin. On this week's show Mark has birthday tunes for John Lennon, John Prine, Jackson Browne and Welsh punk legend Jon Langford. This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions.