Amazon Prime’s latest glossy European drama, Beat, starts badly. Terribly, in fact. Over a soundtrack of the kind of inert pseudo-dance music that usually accompanies the loading screen of a faux-edgy PS2 racing game, we’re told that with the dedication of nightclubs to preserving the allegedly innate importance of rhythm and sound, visiting a one is a little like returning to the womb.

The person giving us this lesson in nightlife ontology is Robert “Beat” Schlag, a promoter in Berlin’s perma-thriving techno scene. Responsible for keeping the patrons of Club Sonar in mechanistic minimal, he’s a line-huffing, pill-popping party animal. This being 2018, it isn’t all fun, frivolity, and wanton sex (though there is a lot of that, too).

One late night, Beat (played perfectly with taut, gaunt blankness by Jannis Niewöhner) is accosted by a hooded reveller. Minutes later, a particularly potent smell starts to waft over the dancefloor. Worse than the usual olfactory assault of BO and stale, spilt booze, the smell is the dripping bodily fluids of disemboweled twins who have been strung up on the ceiling. Beat then becomes an extended investigation into what links the Berlin techno community with an international human organ trafficking ring. Kevin and Perry Go Large, this isn’t.

Kevin and Perry Go Large Photograph: Allstar/Icon Entertainment

In another life, I edited the nightlife website of a global youth media outlet. Which meant that I got to classify looking at my phone in clubs around the world as work. It also meant that I became obsessed with how clubs were portrayed in the wider world. While I knew that most clubs on Earth bore about as much resemblance to the platonic ideal of the Paradise Garage as I do to Larry Levan, I was increasingly protective of these at-risk spaces – especially in terms of representations of them on screen. Beat, happily, gets it right where so many others have got it painfully wrong.

Ignoring the verite veracity of documentary footage, the endless array of early 90s rave clips that litter YouTube like nitrous oxide canisters at a festival, and the front-facing functionality of Boiler Room and its hundreds of lumbering, live-streaming clones, the relationship between moving image and nightlife is less than fruitful.

From The Matrix Reloaded and Blade to Black Swan and Peep Show, clubbers have seen their hallowed spaces desecrated time and time again. All too often, scenes involving nightclubs verge on the embarrassing. It is as if the fact that, at their best, nightclubs offer a genuine sense of experience unlike anything else on the planet fills directorial teams with such a sense of fear that they settle for a stock cast of barely shuffling dancers, the odd strobe, and a feeling of dismal futility.

Several years ago now, I posited that there were three vital ingredients for shooting a successful club scene. First, you need a great record playing. Club Sonar, being an amalgam of Berlin’s bigger clubs (Berghain and Watergate seem particularly influential), thrums to the sound of completely OK tracky techno, which is both fitting and fine.

Next up, you need the club to look busy. I understand why this isn’t always technically possible, but thinking about things such as that makes me feel sad so I try not to. I still prefer to view the moving image with a child’s bedazzled eye. Beat’s club scenes feel organically populated, and more often than not are suffused with the kind of romantic sense of personal abandonment in the collective crowd that usually starts to make sense once your second half of the evening is coursing through your legs.

Unshowy … Jannis Niewöhner as Robert ‘Beat’ Schlag, centre, with friends. Photograph: Amazon

Last, and crucially, you have to get the dancing right. Rely heavily or entirely on boneheaded fist pumping or disco ducking and you have killed any chance you might have had of replicating the gloriously unpredictable thing that is a few hundred strangers (most of whom are on the sort of drugs that make inhibition a completely alien concept) attempting to communicate with their bodies. Beat himself is a good, fluid, unshowy dancer, and the crowds he gathers to his regular subterranean shindigs also seem to have at least a rudimentary understanding of what actual, proper, honest dancing looks like. This shouldn’t be refreshing, but like a bite of McNugget washed down with a gulp of flat Lucozade the morning after a heavy one at Fabric, it undoubtedly is.

While nothing but being there will ever replicate what it’s like to experience DJ Harvey playing disco obscurities over an Ibizan sunset, Jane Fitz turning an out-of-the-way warehouse inside out with shimmering deep house, or Ben Klock thrumming through six hours of jet-black super serious techno in the belly of Berghain, Beat comes close.

Beatisn’t brilliant television. It’s schlocky and overdone and desperately wants to be your new favourite high-minded slab of continental prestige drama. It is, however, one of the very few TV shows ever made that seems to understand just why so many of us chose to spend our lives in the dark, hoping for one more song.

• Beat is available on Amazon Prime from 9 November