About Kleo
Kleo is a German-language spy thriller created by the writing team known as HaRiBo — Hanno Hackfort, Richard Kropf and Bob Konrad — that premiered on Netflix on August 19, 2022. Set in the dying days of the German Democratic Republic and the chaotic months after the Berlin Wall comes down, the series follows Kleo Straub, a young woman raised inside the machinery of the East German state security service to become one of its most capable operatives. When she is suddenly arrested, declared a traitor and locked away, her entire world collapses. The fall of the Wall sets her free, and she walks out with a single purpose: to find out who decided she should be sacrificed, and why.
What follows is a darkly comic, stylish unraveling of a Cold-War conspiracy. As Kleo works her way back through the people who once gave her orders, a rumpled and underestimated West Berlin police officer named Sven Petzold becomes convinced that the suspicious deaths he keeps stumbling across are connected. Their uneasy, often funny partnership drives the show, pulling a mismatched cop and a former insider into the same tangle of old loyalties, buried files and secrets that both German states would prefer stayed buried. The series treats its spy-world violence in brisk, heightened, frequently absurdist terms rather than dwelling on it.
The second season, released worldwide on July 25, 2024, widens the canvas as Kleo and Sven chase the larger truth behind the plot that ruined her life, tangling with figures from both sides of the former Iron Curtain. Throughout, the tone stays distinctive: a candy-colored, pop-scored, blackly humorous take on reunification-era Germany, anchored by Jella Haase's deadpan, magnetic lead performance. The show earned strong reviews and multiple German television honors, and is frequently cited as one of Netflix's most striking German originals.