Ever since Netflix hit our screens, drug dealers have enjoyed even more popularity in the world of TV than they did in the 1980s. This is normally how it goes: a young person (usually a man) from a humble background has entrepreneurial ambitions and loves his family. But he loves the Dead Presidents even more, becomes corrupted in his endless quest for bigger and bigger piles of cash, and sooner or later makes a grave error that has serious consequences and puts him six feet under – or at least behind bars. To date, such series have tended to revolve around billionaire cartel bosses like Pablo Escobar, Félix Gallardo, or Joaquín Guzmán. By contrast, the first German-made drug tale is about an 18-year-old from Leipzig who goes by the name of “Shiny Flakes” on the darknet and in whose bedroom the cops discovered 320 kilograms of narcotics in 2015. The Netflix series is titled: How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast).
Rinseln, 2019. It’s the same old story: the local youngsters are from well-off families and dream of studying abroad – though not because they have a specific life mapped out for themselves, but simply because they want to get away. Rinseln? Ok, you got me – no, there is no such place really, but you’ll find hundreds of similar small towns in Germany. How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast), which for reasons of space we will henceforth abbreviate to HTSDO(F), is set for the most part in nice family homes, on streets lined with nice family homes, in a generic educational institution, and on a dilapidated farm that to all intents and purposes is all that remains in this series of a world in which the great outdoors was anything more than just a backdrop.How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast) takes the usual young-adult formula of “losing the girl and doing anything to get her back” and transmogrifies it into a show that’s thoroughly modern and inventive.
Joel Keller / DECIDER
This narrator is Moritz, a not especially attractive and averagely intelligent nerd with a single-parent father, a best friend who is sick (Lenny, who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness), and a girlfriend, Lisa, who leaves him in the first episode because she has returned from the USA questioning the world, her family, her future, her relationship, and herself. To hide her own restlessness and lack of direction, she regularly takes MDMA, as do most of her fellow students, which is supplied to her by Dan. Dan is one of life’s winners; not only is he from a wealthy family and better than average looking, he is also reckless enough to buy pills from “Buba”, the small town’s local drug kingpin. In short, Moritz perceives him as a threat, and as the reason why Lisa wants time out from their relationship. When he logs onto her Facebook account – during the course of the series Moritz reveals many of the traits of a toxic stalker – he hatches a plan to win Lisa back by buying MDMA himself. As much as he can.
Indeed its screenplay is the greatest weakness of HTSDO(F), with much of the narration and character development feeling cobbled together (with bits of Breaking Bad, bits of Stranger Things, and bits of Fatih Akin) and more of a means to an end rather than anything meaningful or credible (with the exception of a surprise guest appearance by X-Factor host Jonathan Frakes). However, because the right casting decisions were made, and because the series is such a stylish and unerring visual portrayal of how our smartphone-dominated lives unfold, HTSDO(F) is nonetheless one of the best German Netflix production to date, so here’s hoping for a sequel.
Credits:
Written by: Philipp Käßbohrer, Sebastian Colley and Stefan Titze
Director: Lars Montag and Arne Feldhusen.
Created by: Philipp Käßbohrer and Matthias Murmann
Starring: Maximilian Mundt, Anna Lena Klenke, Danilo Kamperidis, Damian Hardung, Baptiste Schaller, Leonie Wesselow, Bjarne Mädel
1 Season: 6 episodes à 30 min.
A Netflix original series, "How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)" first premiered on Netflix on May 31, 2019.
According to a tweet by the production company bildundtonfabrik (btf) a second season of the series is coming to Netflix in 2020.