There is so much going on right now in the Israeli television industry that it’s hard to keep track. So, let’s break it down: Unconditional, the drama series about a mother who fights to release her daughter from a Moscow jail after airport security officers find drugs in her backpack, just premiered on Keshet 12, and will be shown around the world, with English titles, on Apple TV starting on May 8.
The fifth season of Fauda, which introduces a character played by Melanie Laurent and is set in part in France, will begin streaming on Yes VOD and Yes Action in Israel on May 18, and will be available on Netflix at a date to be announced.
And on Wednesday, Hot announced that a new series, The Intern, starring Niv Sultan, the new queen of Israeli television, who starred in Tehran and Murder at the Dead Sea, will premiere on May 19. Sultan plays a brilliant surgeon who works in a transplant unit and makes a desperate decision to break a rule in order to save the life of a patient who has deeply touched her heart. But her choice to break a rule just once opens the door to a dark and complex world. The series, produced by Endemol Shine Israel in collaboration with North Road Company and SIPUR, combines a medical drama with a psychological thriller.
Bart Simpson is still a kid, but The Simpsons is going into its 37th series, and it’s still funny. Yes VOD and Yes Comedy will be showing the new season, and have just released the first episode. It’s 1990s nostalgia, with Marge and Homer digging out their old DVDs.
Marge and Lisa go nuts over a series that is obviously meant to be Dawson’s Creek, and Lisa starts wearing Marge’s old clothes, earning the approval of her school’s fashion police.
Homer and Bart, on the other hand, immerse themselves in ultra-violent action movies. The first 36 seasons can be seen on Disney+, which also features exclusive special episodes called Season 99. Governments rise and fall, but The Simpsons keeps making us laugh.
The most talked-about TV wedding since Game of Thrones’ gory ‘Red Wedding’
If you enjoyed the series, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette on Disney+, The most talked-about TV wedding since Game of Thrones’ gory “Red Wedding” episode is unquestionably the nuptials of Nate (Jacob Elordi) and Cassie (Sydney Sweeney, who is currently in ubiquitous American Eagle shorts commercials) on Euphoria, which airs on HBO Max.
Like so much of the series, the wedding scene and its aftermath are upsetting on many levels. Nate, whose father, Cal (Eric Dane), was arrested for pedophilia after Nate turned over tapes he had made to the police in the last season, was left to run his father’s construction business in Southern California.
Not surprisingly, he made a grandiose deal to build assisted-living centers and got in over his head, eventually finding himself in debt to Naz (Jack Topalian), a loan shark, for $550,000. Pressured by Cassie to spend a huge amount on the wedding – the total cost isn’t discussed, but the flowers she insisted on went for $50,000 – he ignored the loan shark, who interrupts the wedding with his thugs and reveals the mess Nate is in.
Up till then, the wedding has been a model of Gen-Z wedding chic, with a string quartet and bridesmaids’ outfits that match the purple-ish flowers Nate has sold his soul to pay for. The Internet lit up with comments on her wedding gown, which shows off her ample figure while barely covering it up.
Her sister, Lexi (Maude Apatow) and their former classmates, including Rue (Zendaya) and Jules (Hunter Schafer), are all in attendance, watching the wedding with ironic detachment, while Cassie’s mother (Alanna Ubach) walks her down the aisle, keeping up a running whispered commentary on how her wedding was the last happy moment of her life and her marriage was a misery, all of which Cassie does her best to ignore her.
It’s clear from the moment Naz enters that things will get very violent very quickly, but worse than all the horrors inflicted on Nate is the fact that Cassie reacts to her new husband being beaten to a pulp (and worse) as a narcissistic injury – this is supposed to have been the happiest day of her life.
That’s the real horror at the core of Euphoria: the characters alternately hate and indulge themselves, and nobody really loves anybody.
Netflix has a “Classics” genre in its movie section, and in the past, I’ve wanted to talk with whoever programs its algorithm about the fact that mediocre movies from the last five years cannot possibly meet the criteria for classics. But they are taking steps in the right direction, and recently, two true classics were added: My Fair Lady and The Sting.
My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison, is an adaptation of the wildly successful Broadway musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, which was, in turn, adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, a play about a linguistics professor who takes a bet that he can teach a poor Cockney girl to speak well enough to be presented at Buckingham Palace.
Its songs, which include “The Rain in Spain,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” and “On the Street Where You Live,” are beautiful, and the script is witty and full of insights about the British class system. The movie won eight Oscars in 1965, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Harrison, and Hepburn was never more charming.
The Sting re-teamed Robert Redford and Paul Newman after their success in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Sting is a caper film set during the 1930s and isn’t quite as good as Butch Cassidy, but it’s still a crowd-pleasing movie with these two charming stars.
