My wife and I started this. 5 episodes into Season 1. I took 4 years of German in HS and a bit in college so I can "supplement" and sometimes build on and correct the English subtitles. But we tried the dubbing and it is pretty good.

Back to the show. It is very well produced, acted, and is very interesting. Flits between glamorous and debauched raves and total squalor and filth. Corruption, fighting, and political intrigue in an incredibly unique setting and interesting time period.

Give it a shot.

The next season is due out sometime soon, said to be based largely upon the second book of Volker Kutscher's Gereon Rath series - "The Silent Death", about a string of murders of actresses against the background of the change from silent to talking movies. I say largely because after watching the series so far, then binge-reading the books I realized that what I thought was a bit of plot overload in the former stems from the makers cramming in elements from all of the books, not just the initial "The Wet Fish"; I think they were afraid they would get only the initial run of the costly production, and stole everything they could.

Additionally, they overdramatized the backgrounds of the characters quite a bit to get the lush depiction and social commentary on late Weimar conditions spread out over all the series. Spoilers follow.

You have been warned.

This means you.

Yes, you with the innocent look on your face.

Whatever.

In the TV series, Gereon Rath is a traumatized WW I veteran, fighting his shakes with morphine after having abandoned his older brother to the enemy at the front, the likely ulterior motive being that he is in love with the latter's wife, and her son might be his. Of course at the end of the initial run, it turns out that Berlin crime lord "Dr. M." is actually that brother, who survived with a disfigured face. In the books, Gereon was drafted at the end of the war, but never sent to the frontline anymore; his brother died early in the war already, and it is mentioned his mother only believed it when she saw the body, so there is no doubt about his fate.

There is also a middle brother who went to the US before the war, and is dead to his parents because he didn't return to die for the fatherland like a proper German; Gereon sought him out after the war, and they regularly write each other, the brother sending jazz records which Gereon likes. There is no adulterous relationship like in the series. Back home in Cologne, Gereon was engaged, but his fiancée dropped him like a hot potato after he killed a spree shooter who happened to be the son of a local media tycoon in what may have been excessive use of force.

He was sent to Berlin to escape the following media campaign against him, not to fix a porn blackmail attempt supposedly directed at Cologne mayor Konrad Adenauer. That blackmail plot is actually from the second book, and not over compromising sex pictures. Neither is Gereon a drug addict, though he compromises himself by doing some cocaine in the first book, and later develops a bit of a drinking habit. The whole trope of traumatized, disfigured and left-for-dead war veterans is an element from the fifth book, "The Fallen of March".

As for Charlotte Ritter, in the TV series she lives in period-typical Berlin underclass backyard squalor with her family, including a mother dying from syphillis, hiring herself out for day-to-day stenotypist work at police HQ by day, and as a prostitute in the dungeons of the "Moka Efti" club by night. In the books, she is a regularly-employed stenotypist with the homicide division, studying law to become a police officer herself; she is sharing a flat with her friend Greta, who also isn't the poor hard-done-by girl from the series, but the well-to-do daughter of a German engineer and a Swedish actress.

Charly's mother moved back to her hometown in the East after her husband died, and later turns out to be a Nazi sympathizer her daughter would probably have been glad to see die before she messed up her wedding with politics. The "Moka Efti" is mentioned just a single time in the books, Charly having danced there when she got called out to a murder scene in the first book. It's certainly not part of Dr. M.'s crime empire. The whole street-wise rogue girl thing is probably informed by Charly's later tendency to take on and take in petty criminal minors from Berlin's streets.

The Black Reichswehr coup attempt plot is a premature take on the fourth book, "The Fatherland File", which is set against the background of the 1932 "Prussian Coup" in which the Reich government under Chancellor Franz von Papen deposed the State of Prussia's minority government to further their aims of a centralized authoritarian German government - a step crucially enabling later takeover by the Nazis. This entailed replacement of Berlin Police leadership, including Jewish vice commissioner Bernhard Weiß; unlike his stand-in named August Benda in the series, he didn't die in a bomb plot, but did in fact escape the Nazis.

And so on; I hope they will not overload future seasons the same way, having already fleeced the books for all they're worth. Mind, that doesn't mean it's a bad show; rather the opposite, it's an impressive depiction of the late Weimar Republic in its own right. It just diverges significantly from the books with their accurate reference to historic detail, and I think it would benefit from showing less stuff at once.