Series Review: "Dogs of Berlin" (2018).

From the creator of Ze Network comes Dogs of Berlin. This German series created by Christian Alvart. Two cops investigate the murder of a famous Turkish-German soccer player, but one of them has underworld connections that mire the case in controversy.

The series stars Fahri Yardım, Felix Kramer, Urs Rechn, Katharina Schüttler, Anna Maria Mühe, Kais Setti, Mohammed Issa, Deniz Orta, Katrin Sass, Sebastian Zimmler, Alina Stiegler, Hannah Herzsprung, Antonio Wannek, Mišel Matičević, Ivan Vrgoč, Jasna Fritzi Bauer, Constantin von Jascheroff, Imad Mardnli, Branko Tomović, Samy Abdel Fattah, Giannina Erfany-Far, Sinan Farhangmehr, Sebastian Achilles, Hauke Diekamp, Lena Schmidtke, Langston Uibel, Yasin El Harrouk, Robert Gallinowski, Renato Schuch, Paul Wollin, and Seyneb Saleh. Yardım captured the character perfectly. Kramer brilliantly captured the odious ambiguity of his character: a man who is part hero. They made an unlikely yet effective team. Its ever-rotating cast of characters has always been one of the show's greatest strengths, and within two short hours, Schüttler is already shaping up to be one of the most mad and memorable. The casting of Mühe is another masterstroke in a series that has never been short of them -- her performance is nothing short of sublime. I have hopes for Setti as the most intriguing villain yet. The acting, the facial hints of a double, if not triple, life, subtle, that ageless face able to morph from tender to slab-cold cruel within an eyebrow.

It's a complex world and there's a lot going on. That suggests that the show could even improve, as the audience gets to know the characters more. Either way, it is well worth watching. The characters have been memorable, sometimes indelibly so. The plotting has been meticulous, demanding our more than usual attention. Yet it has remained a work of social realism. The show takes the familiar police procedural drama and turns it on its head. There are layers upon layers at work. So when you think a line of inquiry is putting one individual in the frame, a different suspect emerges. The show came to a nail-bitingly exciting end, or rather to three nail-bitingly exciting ends, two of them unforeseeable by even the most imaginative of viewers. This show has no truck with delayed gratification. Its series openers are the storytelling equivalent of those multi-handled 'enforcers' the police use to bash down doors. The show can be totally over-the-top, but it's also compellingly watchable and often thrilling, a masterpiece of misdirection that keeps you guessing. The show is so dense and complicated and interlocking that you can be sure if something doesn't add up, it isn't your failure, which is a relief, as you can never blame the writing. You can't really call any of this formulaic, because the formula is its own, but the pattern of potential surprises feels as if it ought to be fairly well charted by now. As well as being gripping entertainment, the show has become an effective examination of the relationship between the state and the individual.

Simon says Dogs of Berlin receives: