Netflix fans once voted this the best show the company has ever made, ahead of Stranger Things. It was written by a German couple who had never made a TV show before, and the final season came out on June 27, 2020, the exact day the world ends in the story. Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese had one real hit before this, a hacker thriller called Who Am I that did well in Germany. Netflix wanted to see if a German-language drama could work around the world, so it handed them its first German original. They came back with a time travel story about four families in a small town called Winden, and they had all three seasons mapped out before the cameras rolled. The story jumps in 33-year steps, which means you meet a lot of the same people as teenagers in one decade and as tired middle-aged parents in another. So almost every big role needed two or three actors who look like one person at different ages. Think about how hard that is to cast. If even one of those matches looked off, you'd be lost by episode two, and casting director Simone Bär had to pull it off dozens of times. The 33 actually comes from the moon. Thirty-three years on the calendar lines up within about five days of 408 full moons, so the sun and moon end up back in almost the same spot. You can see this in real life with Ramadan. It runs on the lunar calendar, slides about 11 days earlier every year, and lands back in the same season roughly every 33 years. People outside Germany ate it up. Netflix said more than 90% of the audience was international. In Japan, about 3 out of 4 viewers watched season two in the original German, and in South Korea it was over 90%. The family tree got so tangled that Netflix had an agency build an official website just to keep track of who's related to who. It even has a spoiler filter. You tell it what episode you're on and it only shows you what you've already seen. By the time the fan vote happened in 2020, Dark had beaten 63 other Netflix shows and blown out Black Mirror in the final round. When filming wrapped, Friese and Odar took a few things home from set. One of them was the yellow raincoat the kid is wearing in this clip. They'd known how his story ends since before he ever put it on.