Bad Banks

This show is a thrilling fiction based on the financial districts of Germany.

I've been working for several banks in recent years and I very much feel at home when I watch the show. From my perspective, people in Frankfurt - despite the fictional story - behave very much like the characters depicted in Bad Banks.

Camera, lighting, post-edit, costumes, dialogs, screenplay, actors ... all crafts have been performed excellently by great staff members.

However, from my perspective, for some of the main cast members I suggest to further attend acting school soon or to go performing on a live stage to drastically improve their pronunciation. Being a native speaker for decades I often find myself rewinding the show because I didn't understand a word.

Being a Dutchman living in Hamburg, I am not a big fan of German TV-Drama. In many cases it means strange and artificial dialogs, "overacting" and a lot of melodramatic scenes. Bad Banks however is a fantastic series, I am truly amazed how good this German production is. Everything seems to fit: the acting, the scenario, the story in itself, the production design. And what is best, is that they skipped the crazy German synchronisation and let the actors speak in their own mothertongue or dialect. This series is just as good as comparable English or American TV-drama, like recently Billions or (some years ago) Damages, both with similar topics in the financial world. Desiree Nosbusch is great, so is Paula Beer and of course Barry Atsma, with an intensity and authenticity that I have rarely seen before. A good thing that ZDF immediately offered all 6 episodes on their website, because you should simply enjoy a terrific series like this in one long session. 10 out of 10. Excellent!

The series gives an interesting picture of how the elite divide the jobs and how they go to their limits to achieve their goal. The first episode was exciting until the end.

Viewed in the Dutch version. No problems with the dubbing. It just seemed like a Dutch series, only the acting was of a higher level.

I really liked the first season 8/10. It had a nice concept, a beginning, an end and somewhat ironic moral and it can be taken seriously. The second season is completly different show 5-6/10. It feels like an after thought and desperate attempt to creat something new by borrowing heavily from the first season. It's completly ignoring what made the first season special and how audience was drawn into the exciting world of Bad Banks in a first place. It's more like a really bad remix of an original song that has no idea why it is remixing it in a first place. Basiclly the second season is a soap opera.

I really enjoyed season 1 but season 2 is just a mess of over the top acting and cringy dialogue