Lindenstraße (literally "Linden Street") was a long-running German television drama series, broadcast by Das Erste. The first episode aired on 8 December 1985 and since then new episodes were broadcast weekly until 2020. Its last timeslot on Das Erste was Sundays at 18:50. The events of the Sunday episode usually take place on the Thursday before the show. This is a result of the original plan having been to show each episode on a Thursday night. Before the start of the series the programme's timeslot was switched to Sunday evening, but Thursday remained the day on which the events are normally shown as taking place, because the original concept of dramatizing the events of daily life as experienced by a group of characters on an ordinary weekday has continued unchanged. Exceptions are the so-called holiday episodes where the events take place on such special occasions as Christmas and Easter; also on important election days (especially general elections to the German Bundestag).

Setting the pace for other soap operas in Germany, the first episodes were mostly met with poor reviews. However, Lindenstraße soon became one of the most successful shows on German television.

On 16 November 2018 it was announced that the ARD television programme conference had decided – on cost grounds, despite the programme's continuing to attract between two and three million viewers weekly – not to extend its contract with the show's producers, Geißendörfer Film- und Fernsehproduktion, and that the series would therefore come to an end, after 35 years, in March 2020.