The First German Netflix Series: Dark

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A few days ago, I had the chance to watch the first three episodes of “Dark”. The director and co-writer Baran bo Odar attended the event and answered every question about the series during the Q&A after the screening.

This is a paraphrase, since I don’t have a recording. By “we”, he means his partner, Jantje Friese, the other co-writer.

Netflix had seen our film Who Am I and offered to turn that material into a series. But we didn’t want to do anything more with hackers, so we declined. Netflix then asked whether we had a different idea. We said yes.

There was a budget, and the only requirement was to deliver ten episodes of about an hour each. Netflix’s US executives read every version of the script and watched every edit, and gave us comments, but always with the reminder: “You’re the showrunner.” Some of their notes were just misunderstandings from an American perspective. Everything was our own decision.

That approach seems to have paid off. The first three episodes are very promising, with a mood a little like Lost, time travel and nuclear power plants, only in the most average small town in Germany. Raider is now called Twix, the police car is a little Golf I, and something is wrong with the lighting in the school.

The spooky music is a little over the top for my taste. I don’t know how the whole season ends; it could still lose its way later on. But Netflix’s executives are getting a lot right by simply letting go of the reins. Applause!

Meanwhile, at ZDF, the miniseries “Familie Braun” wins an International Emmy, and as a reward it gets shown again at 12:45 a.m. on Friday night.

And the Tatort colleagues commit to no more than two episodes a year that knock Grandma backwards off the sofa; the rest will continue to be churned out according to the formula.

Here’s the trailer for Dark, though it gives quite a lot away.

The series launches worldwide on Netflix on December 1.