BERLIN — When the spy series “Deutschland 83” had its premiere in 2015, it was portrayed as a breakthrough moment for German television. At that point, the country had yet to produce any prestige shows with an international following, unlike France and Denmark. The series, which followed a young East German soldier corralled into working as an undercover agent on the other side of the Iron Curtain, was the first German show to air on an American network, SundanceTV. In Britain it became the most-watched foreign-language drama ever.

But, to the surprise of many — including its creators, Anna and Jörg Winger, a married couple — the show was a ratings disappointment in its home country when it aired there several months after its American premiere. Although the first episode garnered a respectable 3.2 million viewers, that number plunged in the following weeks, sparking a media discussion about why Germans were staying away from the country’s first internationally acclaimed series. Some blamed its overly sympathetic depiction of East German agents, others the advertising campaign by its German broadcaster, RTL, which they argued was unimaginative and old-fashioned. Bild, the country’s highest-selling newspaper, called it “the flop of the year.”

In making “Deutschland 86” — the second season of the show, which began airing on SundanceTV in the United States last week, and has been streaming on Amazon Prime in Germany, Austria and Switzerland since Oct. 19 — its creators had to confront the awkward reality of the first season’s geographically divergent popularity. “I would be honest and say it was quite painful,” Ms. Winger said in a recent interview in Berlin alongside her husband. “Every interview I gave for two years began with, ‘How does it feel to have made the most publicized flop in the history of German TV?’ ”