After a long wait, fans could finally look forward to the arrival of the 4th season of “Babylon Berlin” on free TV and the media library on Erste a few days ago. The grand finale of the new season will air on October 4 on ARD, which raises the question of what will happen next for the characters surrounding Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) and Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries). There is no question for fans whether the successful series should have more episodes – because we will leave the season on a huge cliffhanger.
Fortunately, Achim von Borries, who is part of the directing and writing team of the historical series together with Tom Tykwer and Henk Handloegten, also shares this feeling. As he did in an interview with explained, the story is far from told: “It is clear to anyone who has seen the series that we are not done yet. I like to compare it to the movie ‘Titanic’: if you stop before you reach the iceberg, you have done something wrong. Every viewer knows where it is going. But we put a lot of work into not hitting the iceberg yet and maintaining the illusion and hope that everything can turn out differently – and with ‘Babylon Berlin’ you can never be sure…”, so by Borries in an interview.
Recently, the series had to worry bitterly about its future, as Sky and its associated streaming service WOW stopped all upcoming and ongoing German in-house productions a few months ago. The new series project “Huntsville AL” by Achim von Borries, which was only put into operation in 2022, would be affected by this. To the delight of fans and team, ‘Babylon Berlin’ was one of the few productions that was not included in this death sentence, because ARD wants to continue without Sky’s support.
As ARD Degeto boss Thomas Schreiber announced shortly after Sky’s departure, the immense national and international success of the series is a reason to want to play even more seasons without the streaming service.
Could the fifth season of “Babylon Berlin” be filmed this year?
There was approximately a two-year gap between the production of the previous seasons. Since the fourth season was filmed in 2021, it’s reasonable to assume that production of new episodes could begin as soon as this year. However, Tom Tykwer still has a busy schedule at the moment, as the celebrated filmmaker will initially work on the drama ‘The Light’, which will be his first feature film since 2016. So it would be sporty – but not impossible – if the ‘Babylon Berlin’ cameras were on this year.
The content of ‘Babylon Berlin’ is based on the popular series of crime novels by Volker Kutscher. While the first two seasons of the series are based on the 2007 debut novel “The Wet Fish,” season 3 was based on the second novel “The Silent Death.” The third novel “Goldstein” serves as the basis for the current fourth season.
After this continuity, a fifth season would mainly use the fourth Kutscher novel “The Fatherland Files”. Here Gereon Rath goes to a rival establishment of Moka Efti, the infamous Haus Vaterland on Potsdamer Platz, where a dead man is found in an elevator. At the same time, current events continue to unfold and we move closer to the year 1933…