"Deutschland 83" is a coming-of-age spy thriller, which unfolds just as the Cold War between East and West comes to a head. The eight-part series is written and created by American journalist and author Anna Winger (This Must Be the Place) alongside her husband Joerg Winger, a successful German showrunner ("Soko Leipzig"), who serves as executive producer. The New York Times touted the series as an "ingenious, counterintuitive look at the Cold War." "Deutschland 83" is a captivating story set against the real culture wars and political events of Germany in the 1980s. The drama follows Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay) as the 24-year-old East German native is pulled from the world as he knows it and sent to the West as an undercover spy for the Stasi foreign service. Hiding in plain sight in the West German army, he must gather the secrets of NATO military strategy. Everything is new, nothing is quite what it seems and everyone he encounters is harboring secrets, both political and personal.

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'Deutschland 83,' 10 p.m. Wednesdays on Sundance Four stars (out of four)

If you didn't think your favorite new show of summer would be a German miniseries, in German, think again.

"Deutschland 83," an eight-episode Cold War thriller making its debut Wednesday on the Sundance Channel, is the first German-language series to air in the United States. It's enough to make us demand more, possibly an entire channel of German drama, if they're all this good.

Fans of "The Americans" will especially want to tune in, because "Deutschland 83" picks up where that show's Season 3 ended, with Ronald Reagan taking a hard-line, televised stance against the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union.

The speech aired on March 8, 1983, and that's the "83" in the title. The Cold War is at its coldest as the drama opens in divided Berlin, where the East Germans, feeling like a pawn, believe the United States is preparing to bomb them. They need a spy in the West to collect evidence and get details.

"Deutschland 83" looks at all this via young Martin (wonderful Jonas Nay), an East German border guard who has no inclination for espionage.

But Martin's aunt works in East German intelligence, and she knows he looks the part to impersonate a new aide to a West German general. Cruelly, she forces him in, using his dying mother as a lever, and then having him taken by force.

This may sound grim, but "Deutschland 83" actually succeeds because it's not just gripping but also wildly entertaining, a terrific blend of light and dark with a fun, retro-'80s soundtrack.

Consider this scene, when a conscripted Martin flees from his abductors in West Berlin. Running into a supermarket, he stops dead, confronted by an array of merchandise the likes of which he has never seen, so colorful and tantalizing, the angels might be singing. (Later, they sing again when he tastes his first fast food.)

And so Martin becomes a spy, although he's hardly a James Bond. In just the first two episodes, provided for preview, he makes some really stupid mistakes and has a very close escape. He's clever, but at 24, he's still a kid, and it's clear that his new bosses will sacrifice him if necessary.

Don't worry about the subtitles. As we learned in "The Returned," which aired on Sundance in French, subtitles are just better closed-captioning, and reading them is a lot easier than struggling with accents.

Especially in the case of "Deutschland 83," a little reading brings great reward.

Read about more new summer dramas.

Amazon Prime’s The Man in the High Castle isn’t the only German-themed historical series on the air. According to the Hollywood Reporter, there could be a season two of Sundance TV’s German-language, Cold War drama Deutschland 83.

The series is a co-production between Sundance TV and the German TV network RTL Television. The first season premiered in the United States on June 17, 2015.

Created by Anna and Joerg Winger, the show centers on a young East German spy who goes undercover in the West.

While the series has garnered moderate buzz internationally, German audiences didn’t take to it as expected. Ratings for the series’ home country debut were less than stellar, with a reported 3.19 million viewers for its season premiere this week.

Still, the creative team behind the series say that second and third seasons are not out of the question yet. The second season would be called Deutschland 86 and the third would be called Deutschland 89, the year the Berlin Wall came down and ended the Cold War.