Summary
A clever follow-up season that expands the core premise in funny new directions while retaining its core appeal, How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) is just as funny, energetic, and binge-worthy as it was last year.
This review of How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) season 2 is spoiler-free. You can check out our thoughts on the previous season by clicking these words.
You can also check out all of our recaps of this season by clicking these ones.
When it comes to German Netflix Original series’, Dark is the runaway success story. But now that masterful, time and space-bending sci-fi epic has concluded, a rival show is hot on its heels. How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast), a knockabout teen comedy based on a true story, proved to be a surprising success when it debuted last year, and now, with another highly binge-able six episodes on the streaming platform, all of which take what worked about the first outing and extend it in fun new directions, it’s positioned to become one of the most popular international offerings out there. For the most part, it deserves the accolades.
The secret of the show’s success is that it’s thoroughly ridiculous but also oddly believable — it is true, after all, but despite all the show’s meta fourth-wall-breaking flourishes, you can always identify that grain of reality. It’s rooted in everyday teenage anxieties; in the first season, awkward dork Moritz (Maximilian Mundt) set up an online drug-dealing business with the help of his disabled and terminally-ill best friend Lenny (Danilo Kamber) in order to win back his girlfriend, Lisa (Lena Klenke), who had returned from America with a penchant for ecstasy. And Moritz was successful — so successful, in fact, that How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) season 2 finds he, Lenny, and their moronic co-conspirator Daniel (Damian Hardung) sitting pretty on their first million Euros.
But as various sage philosophers have posited, with more money comes more problems. Moritz and Lenny both think it’s time to get out of the business while they can, but the former can’t quite let go of the reputation afforded him by his enigmatic new m1000 alias, and his visit to Amsterdam in order to tell their suppliers that they’re shutting down becomes a multi-stage presentation about expansion. He’s back with Lisa but wants to keep their relationship totally separate from the MyDrugs business, which she doesn’t know about, but that’s complicated when she moves in with him. And Lenny has a burgeoning relationship with Kira, a fellow nerd whom he has been catfishing on Discord using pictures of Daniel.
It’s still funny. It still has the ring of truthfulness and it still has a keen awareness of pop-culture and nerd ephemera that helps both the characterizations and the gags. And it has perhaps more confidence now than it did before, riding a wave of earlier success and arriving on a quiet week to a pre-existing audience who can’t wait for more of the story. Who can blame them?
