21-03-2025
This Underrated Thriller Set In The Aftermath Of WWII Needs To Be Your Next Series Binge
That's how a character describes post-World War II Berlin in Måns Mårlind's underrated historical thriller series: The Defeated (titled Shadowplay in Europe).
The comment, of course, refers to the way in which the victorious Allied powers — the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and France — divided the beleaguered German capital into four different sectors at the end of the conflict.
By the time V-E Day rolled around in May 1945, however, the city was a depressing shell of its former self; a bombed-out wasteland of rubble, death, hunger, corruption, general lawlessness, and the rumblings of a frigid geopolitical stalemate between America and Russia. The last bit of cordial cooperation between the two was the main Nuremberg Trial against the surviving members of the Nazi High Command. At the same time, war criminals still at large were desperately looking for a way to get out of the country or keep a low-profile at the very least.
'We have a billion films about the war and we have a billion films and series about the Cold War,' Mårlind says over Zoom. 'But the complete aftermath [of WWII] is the most disturbing, distressing, and painful time, because that's when the civilians suffered the most. It's a direct aftermath of the war and the horrors and confusion of that.'
New York City police officer Max McLaughlin (Taylor Kitsch) hopes to tame that chaos when he arrives in the sweltering summer of 1946, with a mission to establish a viable law enforcement body in the American Sector. Not the easiest job in the world when you need to navigate both the rising distrust between countries who refuse to collaborate on the most basic of issues, as well as the dangerous machinations of a thriving criminal underworld. Everyone left standing is pretty much out for themselves and everyone has a price, which means incomplete intelligence, morally questionable decisions, and cold-blooded betrayal are all cozy bedfellows.
'When you can get away with anything, do you do that or do you not do that?" muses the show's creator. 'Do you help the poor, or do you exploit the poor? That was the thing that always kept the storyline going. It's not about good or evil, and that's why I don't like the American title, because it's so simple. It's [really]
For Max, the entire situation is — to borrow an acronym oft-used by American GIs during World War II — FUBAR. But he's not leaving Berlin until he finds his missing older brother, Moritz (Logan Marshall-Green), who went AWOL after the liberation of Dachau and set off on a vigilante campaign of murdering Nazi war criminals — from concentration camp guards to members of the Einsatzgruppen death squads — in gruesome fashion. Think of the cathartic revenge against ardent acolytes of the Third Reich featured in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds and David Weil's Hunters.
'I think that I became Moritz [while] writing [the series] because reading about all the atrocities in the concentration camps, I felt the rage and the hate,' Mårlind admits. 'I think it's very important to sympathize with your your villain, because otherwise, you just write a Bond villain. You have to understand what drives him, and I could understand him completely. Moritz is a good guy, but he's doing horrible things. He's a killer, but he he saw something that cracked him. Max is a cop, but he is also doing bad things [from a position of authority]. So it's all about the shadow at play within ourselves, which is enhanced in the most violent place on Earth at the time — Berlin.'
While he could not fully escape the influence of The Third Man, Mårlind forbade his cast and crew from watching the noir classic set in post-war Prague. 'I didn't want to hear a single f—ing reference saying, 'This is kind of like The Third Man,'' he says with a smile. 'It's one my favorite films, and I tried to erase it from my head, but I couldn't.' Ironically, the entire show was filmed in Prague, with the city itself and 'three big backlots' standing in for a muggy Berlin, circa 1945. 'I'm very, very conscious watching other people's history things, because I think so many of them look stiff and fake,' adds the creator. 'That's why the heat was really important, people needed to be sweaty … There were six to eight bombed-out blocks that were made [to look like post-war]
The estranged brotherhood element is just one of several intersecting storylines that Mårlind juggles with the aplomb of revered historical/thriller storytellers like Robert Harris (Fatherland) and Joseph Kanon (The Good German).
In addition to his search for Moritz, Max also crosses paths with a number of memorable characters: Elsie Garten (Nina Hoss), head of the newly-formed police precinct; Tom Franklin (Michael C. Hall), the smarmy US Vice-consul to whom Max reports; Claire Franklin (Tuppence Middleton), Tom's seductive, femme fatale wife; Gad (Maximilian Ehrenreich), a young Jewish Holocaust survivor and police officer with a talent for illustration; Karin Mann (Mala Emde), a loyal lieutenant of the charismatic crime-lord known only as 'Angel Maker' (Sebastian Koch); and General Alexander Izosimov (Ivan G'Vera) ruthless head of the Russian sector.
Mårlind's stunning exploration of nearly every post-war viewpoint is what makes The Defeated/Shadowplay must-watch television. He even found room to include a brief appearance from Nakam, a vengeful band of Jewish Holocaust survivors who wanted to even the score by killing six million Germans. 'I just love to read about these fearless Jewish people who weren't running away,' Mårlind says. 'They're like, 'We're staying put, we're going to die, and we're going to kill six million Germans.' I think that was…maybe not courageous; it was destructive, of course, but I still love it.'
If you ever find yourself bouncing around Europe, it is completely worth checking out Shadowplay, which the creator prefers as his definitive 'director's cut.' Despite sharing a lot of similarities, the two versions are completely different shows. Nevertheless, The Defeated came and went in the United States with little fanfare, a disappointing eventuality that Mårlind chalks up to the fact that average Americans were lucky enough to avoid the utter devastation WWII wrought upon the European continent.
'In America, when we had test screenings, [audiences asked] 'Where is Berlin?' and then, 'What do you mean sectors?'' the creator remembers. 'The Second World War is so close to Europeans' hearts. America, of course, has its own memories, but they don't have very much [knowledge of] the aftermath.
Another unfortunate outcome is that Mårlind never got to finish the saga in a planned second season, which would have seen Moritz audaciously going after Pope Pius XII in response to the Vatican's role in helping war criminals escape Europe.
'He's killing the Pope in the first couple of episodes and I'm super happy with the tension,' Mårlind reveals. 'People would be very upset about it, but I really like that. And then, of course, the story returns to Berlin. It's [set]
All eight episodes of The Defeated are now streaming on Netflix
