Everyone who watched 4 Blocks already knows how this family’s story ends. It ends with Toni Hamady at the head of a Berlin clan and with the particular tiredness of a man who ran out of exits a long time ago. 4 Blocks Zero begins from the other end of that sentence, in the years before the Hamadys were a clan at all — when they were still a household of a father, his children, a grandmother, and a series of doors that keep closing in their faces.

The series is a prequel to 4 Blocks, the German crime drama that ran from 2017 to 2019 and turned Neukölln into one of the defining settings of European television. Zero rewinds to 1990s Berlin, where Malik Hamady, played by Rami Fadel Khalaf, has brought his four children and his mother-in-law out of Lebanon and is trying to build a legitimate life in a city that keeps informing him he does not belong. The premise is quietly domestic. It is about a family hunting for a foothold, not a syndicate hunting for territory, and that difference is the whole argument of the show.

The engine of the season is Ibrahim, played by Tariq Al-Saies, the brother-in-law who arrives after eight years in prison carrying a secret the family cannot afford to keep. In the parent series the Hamadys are already an established fact of Berlin’s underworld; here they are a decision that has not been made yet, and Ibrahim is the man who forces the question. Tareq Nassery plays the young Ali — the boy who will grow into Toni Hamady — which asks the show’s most familiar figure to be performed in the past tense, as someone the audience has already watched harden into a different man.

A prequel that already knows the ending

A prequel is an odd piece of dramaturgy. It cannot surprise you about the destination, so it has to make the route matter: the small permissions, the first compromise, the moment a survival tactic quietly becomes a way of living. Directors Özgür Yıldırım and Hüseyin Tabak, working from scripts led by head writer Bernd Lange, have inherited a world whose ending is already canon and have to write its beginning as though it were still open. The wager of Zero is that viewers will care about choices whose outcome they can already recite by heart.

That is a demand on the writing before it is a demand on anything else. The parent series earned its weight because it treated its characters as neither victims nor monsters, and because Kida Khodr Ramadan’s Toni carried a genuinely tragic charge. A prequel has to justify itself as more than a lap of honour, which means Zero has to find, in a father’s ordinary stubbornness and a boy’s ordinary loyalty, the grammar of everything that comes later. The household is the text here — Malik’s insistence on doing things properly, the grandmother Hanin, played by Fatima Khanfour, holding a family memory that predates Berlin, the brother Abbas, played by Soufiane El Mesaudi, watching how his siblings choose.

Özgür Yıldırım has spent much of his career inside German milieu cinema, and the choice of two directors rather than one for an eight-episode season suggests a production that wants a consistent world more than a single signature. What they are adapting is not a novel but a memory the audience already carries: the finished Hamadys. Every scene of the young family is therefore doing double work, playing as its own present and as the prologue to a future the viewer supplies.

The city that closed the doors

The route matters because the history is real. The Berlin the Hamadys arrive in is a city in the middle of reunification, where many Lebanese refugee families lived for years under Duldung, a suspended legal status that tolerated your presence without permitting your work. A family told it may stay but may not earn is a family steered toward the one economy that will take it. Zero locates the origins of the clan in that documented pressure rather than in any inherited criminality, which is both the more uncomfortable version of the story and the more honest one.

This is where the series can carry a political charge the parent show could mostly only imply. 4 Blocks was, in the end, a genre piece with tragic ambitions; a prequel set at the point of arrival can look directly at the machinery — the offices, the refusals, the years of waiting — that turns an asylum case into a criminal one. The risk is the opposite failure: that explaining how the Hamadys were pushed becomes a way of excusing where they went. The official trailer sells it as a family story first and a crime story second, which suggests the show already knows which of those two risks it would rather run.

There is a coming-of-age film buried inside the crime series, and it may be the part that matters most. Ali is a child when the story opens, and the Zero of the title reads like a promise that we are watching a count begin from nothing — a boy with a full set of options narrowing, one refusal at a time, toward the single path the parent show has already closed behind him. The most useful thing a prequel can do is make ordinary decisions legible: the odd job taken, the favour accepted, the loyalty that looks like love before it looks like a debt. Whether Zero has the patience to stay with those small hinges, rather than racing toward the iconography of the clan, is what its eight episodes have to prove.

Zero also arrives inside a specific television lineage. 4 Blocks sat alongside Dogs of Berlin and Skylines in the German streaming-crime wave of the late 2010s, but it was the entry that felt least like an import of American cable formulas and most like a story that could only have been set where it was. For HBO Max, reviving that world as its own prehistory is a bet on local-language originals as anchors rather than filler — a wager that a German-made series about a German story can hold a global platform’s marquee. Mark Waschke, one of German television’s most recognisable faces, appears in the wider cast, a signal of the register the production is aiming for.

What Zero cannot resolve is the problem every origin story eventually meets. Understanding how someone became who they are is not the same as forgiving it, and it is not always different from simply watching them fall in slower, more sympathetic motion. The series knows where Ali is going; the audience knows it too. The open question is whether knowing changes what we owe the boy before he gets there — whether a beginning we have already seen the end of is a warning, an elegy, or an alibi.

4 Blocks Zero premieres on 25 September 2026 on HBO Max, which rolls out the eight-episode first season weekly. Özgür Yıldırım and Hüseyin Tabak direct from scripts headed by Bernd Lange, with a cast led by Rami Fadel Khalaf as Malik, Tareq Nassery as the young Ali, Tariq Al-Saies as Ibrahim, Soufiane El Mesaudi as Abbas and Fatima Khanfour as the grandmother Hanin. The series is in German, a prequel to the 2017–2019 original.

Tags: hbo max, 4 Blocks Zero, 4 Blocks, Hamady family, Tareq Nassery, Tariq Al-Saies