Babylon Berlin’s high production values, serious subject matter, labyrinthine plot structure, and distinctive visual style—often attributed to showrunner Tom Tykwer’s authorial vision—positions the series firmly within the recent “quality European TV” canon alongside other international successes such as The Young Pope (2016), The Crown (2016–), Gomorrah (2014–), Borgia (2011–2014), and The Bureau (2015–) (Eichner 193, Barra and Scaglioni 1-10). Quality European television is a discursive category formulated as a transatlantic iteration of the American “quality” tradition, which heralded series such as The Sopranos (1999–2007), The Wire (2002–2007), Breaking Bad (2008–2013), and Mad Men (2007–2015) as more culturally legitimate offerings than their mass-appeal television counterparts on the basis of their employment of characteristics found in supposedly “higher” arts, such as literature and cinema. American “quality” television has been characterized as an overtly masculinist tradition (Lotz, Fuller and Driscoll, DeFino). Indeed, recent series such as Game of Thrones (2011–2019), True Detective (2014–2019), or Westworld (2017–) that court association with this “quality” label often position women as ciphers for investigations into the male psyche (Wilkins 37). As such, my opening claim may invite similar assumptions regarding Lotte. Yet, although frequently placed in situations that threaten gender-based violence and the associated male-serving corporeal traumas that recur in series like True Detective, Lotte’s body is not used as a site for the explication of male psychological crises. Rather, Lotte is overburdened by the sheer volume of work Babylon Berlin requires her to perform. Lotte’s work is represented narratively as a female member of the Weimar precariat and metatextually as a figure called upon to embody a range of competing historical and cultural referents and their respective ideologies in line with “quality” television’s intertextual repertoires. On both levels, Lotte is overworked and ultimately, underpaid.