Archive / On screen
Netflix made a comedy about this case, then a documentary, then it happened again
The fictional series came first and made the story famous. The documentary came second and put the real man on camera. Both were made by the same production company. And on the prosecution case, a second drug shop was trading while the documentary was being filmed.
Shiny_Flakes: The Teenage Drug Lord
| Released | 3 August 2021 |
|---|---|
| Directors | Eva Müller, Michael Schmitt |
| Production | Bildundtonfabrik (btf) |
| Runtime | 96 minutes |
| Language | German |
Built around access to Schmidt, filmed over several years, alongside defence counsel, the prison director, the public prosecutor and the psychological expert who assessed him.
How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)
| Series one | 31 May 2019 |
|---|---|
| Series two | July 2020 |
| Series three | July 2021 |
| Series four | 8 April 2025, final |
| Creators | Philipp Käßbohrer, Matthias Murmann |
| Lead | Maximilian Mundt as Moritz Zimmermann |
Moritz Zimmermann is invented. The premise - a teenager building a drug shop from a bedroom in a small German town - is taken from this case. When the third season was announced in July 2020, Deadline described it as Netflix’s most-streamed German original series.
The order of events is the interesting part
The sequence is not what most people assume. The comedy-drama arrived in May 2019, two months before Schmidt was released from prison, and it is what made the story famous internationally. The documentary followed in August 2021, and its commercial logic was explicitly to give the audience of the sitcom the real thing. Bildundtonfabrik made both.
So a production company built a hit series on a criminal case, and then went back to the man himself, by then out of prison. What the documentary captures is somebody entirely comfortable being looked at - the same quality that produced a press interview in September 2014 and a published performance dashboard.
What the films leave out
Both are good at what they are for. The drama is a comedy about adolescence that happens to be about drugs, and it is not pretending to be a record. The documentary is a genuine piece of work with real access, and its central question - what do you do with a clever young man who did this and does not appear to regret it - is the right one.
What neither has much room for is the part this archive keeps returning to. Roughly fourteen thousand entries in a spreadsheet. Four thousand five hundred and sixteen investigations in Germany, about a thousand more abroad, prosecutors in all sixteen federal states still working the file years later. A promise on the website that customer addresses were encrypted, which was not true.
A film about an unrepentant young man is a portrait. The list of everyone the shop took down with it is a different film, and nobody has made it. That material is here.
The title has an underscore
Shiny_Flakes, with an underscore, is the documentary’s styling, not the shop’s. The shop wrote itself as Shiny-Flakes with a hyphen in its own page titles and product names. Netflix listings and much of the coverage then collapsed it to shinyflakes, which is how a domain that was never the shop ended up being named as though it were. Which one was which.
Where to watch
Both are Netflix originals and stream there: the documentary and the series. Availability varies by territory. This archive has no relationship with Netflix or with Bildundtonfabrik and earns nothing from either link.
Reviews of the documentary, including the ones sceptical of how sympathetically it treats its subject, are indexed on the press page.