Stream It Or Skip It: ‘How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast)’ On Netflix, Where A Nerd Tries To Get His Bae Back By Selling MDMA

If you’re a parent of teens, you know that they are exposed to a heck of a lot more of everything than you were. Social media, smartphones, and easy-to-get drugs have made the teenage years even more fraught than before. But it also opens up a lot of opportunity, even if it’s not always the most savory kinds. A German kid finds this out in the comedy How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast). Read on for more info….

HOW TO SELL DRUGS ONLINE (FAST): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a drug dealer get chased and arrested by a SWAT team, then we hear a voice over saying, “This isn’t me, but one of my copycats.”

The Gist: Moritz Zimmermann (Maximilian Mundt) is a 17-year-old drug kingpin who has learned how to move large amounts of drugs like MDMA online without being detected. He starts to tell the tale of how this started. Of course, it had to do with a girl.

The girl is Lisa Novak (Lena Klenke), who has more or less been his girlfriend since they were kids. She has spent a year studying abroad in the U.S., mostly in New York; she’s on her way back, and Moritz can’t wait. He’s collected all of their WhatsApp text conversations in a book, and has other surprises in store for her return to Germany. But when she calls him from the airport, she tells him that she needs space.

Devastated, he tries to do what he considers unthinkable: log into her Facebook account to see what she’s been up to. He resists, but is so distracted by Lisa’s dumping that he completely flubs the business pitch he and his best friend Lenny Sander (Danilo Kamber) have for a school business class. The idea is interesting: MyTems, an eBay-style marketplace for rare weapons, armor and other items to use in online games. It doesn’t help that he sees Lisa talking to Daniel Riffert (Damian Hardung), the handsome rich kid who just happens to be the school’s resident MDMA dealer.

When he finally breaks down and logs on to Lisa’s account, Moritz is horrified to see that his sweet, nerdy girlfriend is now into taking ecstasy. He stays logged into her account and sees Messenger texts between Lisa and Dan about Lisa’s welcome-home party (which Moritz isn’t invited to) and how much of the “good stuff” he’s going to bring. Determined to make Lisa pay attention to him again, he decides to track Dan to where he buys his MDMA, using some fascinating social-media sleuthing, to a pizzeria. He somehow gets the scary dealer that owns the joint to sell all of his supply even though Moritz is short on cash; Moritz uses some handy-dandy mobile phone tricks to get the dealer to relent. Lenny is pissed when he learns Moritz got the cash from MyTems’ startup funds.

Moritz crashes Lisa’s party but can’t unload his bag of MDMA, because Dan had just enough, and he gets a kick in the teeth (thanks to Dan’s Capoiera training) for his trouble.

Our Take: How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast) takes the usual young-adult formula of “losing the girl and doing anything to get her back” formula and transmogrifies it into a show that’s thoroughly modern and inventive. Creators Julian Gaupp-Maier, Philipp Käßbohrer, Valerie Lasserre have realized that this trope, especially in the #MeToo era, feels creepy. So, they figured, why not take the creepiness all the way and make the nerdy dude a drug dealer?

Of course, we’re also supposed to be sympathetic to the nerdy Moritz, so there are other factors at play here. Moritz acknowledges the Gen Z philosophy in a voice over, where he talks about how the kids of his generation can have the world at their fingertips via their phones, and can be whatever they want, or at least show whatever face they want to the public. He doesn’t buy into that; he figures he’ll get his due eventually. “Nerd today, boss tomorrow,” he says in English, aping the paths that folks like Jeff Bezos took to prominence.

Moritz lost his mother at a young age, which explains his attachment to Lisa, but it seems that a normal human male would give his blossoming bae the space she needed. If anything, that pathway to making the seemingly meek Moritz Europe’s leading online drug dealer is a big flaw of the show; it’s hard to get on board with Moritz’s scheme because, at least for now, we don’t know a lot about what brought him and Lisa together and kept them together for so many years.

The creators do some fun fourth-wall breaking in the series, where Moritz talks about how Netflix is doing a series about his story, and how he brings up the “Skip intro” button to tell people to skip his swim instructor’s treatise on MDMA. But none of that is integral to the story, and it’ll be intriguing to see how Moritz uses the technology he and Lenny (mostly Lenny) developed to sell drugs instead of Fortnite accessories.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Moritz goes home, opens his laptop, and searches for “how to sell drugs online”. He pushes the window over to see his desktop wallpaper photo of a younger, brace-faced Lisa. He goes back to the search window and adds the word “fast”, then clicks “Search.”

Sleeper Star: Kamber is great as Lenny, who takes chances in life because his doctors never thought he’d live to be 17. He seems to have his head on straight, so how he ends up going along with Moritz’s scheme will be interesting to watch.

Most Pilot-y Line: We found it interesting that all texts are shown in English. We get why, because having it shown in German would make it tough for viewers to go to subtitles, especially if they’re watching the English-dubbed version. But it’s one of those things that seems incongruous if you think about it for a second.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re not sure if Moritz, the main character in How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast) is supposed to be a total creep or not. But seeing this nerdy teen become a drug lord will be an interesting watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast) on Netflix