Jaffa, a new KAN 11 series running on Sundays and Wednesdays (which can also be seen on kan.org.il), is a crime drama that focuses on the titular mixed Arab-Jewish city, and it’s very good. It focuses on the aftermath of the shooting of a Jewish girl, Adi (Neta Roth) on one of Jaffa’s streets at night.
Adi had just performed a theater piece about Jewish-Arab coexistence at a club, and was with her Arab boyfriend, Adam (Arkan Tarif, who was in Manayek), when his brother, Saleh (Adam Khoury, from Fauda and Image of Victory) showed up on his motorcycle.
She convinces Saleh, who is involved in the drug trade, to let her and Adam go for a spin around the block on the motorcycle and he agrees – and it is while they are riding that she gets shot.
Many characters are quickly drawn into the story. A community policeman, Amir (Shadi Mar’i) is nearby and chases the gunman, but hesitates to shoot him, preferring to fire into the air, and loses him.
(Mar’i, who won an Ophir Award for Best Actor for his performance in Yousef Abo Madegem’s Eid, is also well known for his roles in Fauda and the movie Bethlehem.) Due to his mistake, he is taken off the case by a senior police investigator, played by Lena Fraifeld (who was in Valeria Is Getting Married and Unsilenced), but he wants to prove himself and help.
The series also looks into the lives of Adi’s parents, played by Neta Riskin (Shtisel and Nandauri) and Alon Pdut (Asylum City). Her mother has a food blog and snorts cocaine, while her father is a successful contractor who employs many Arabs on building sites in the area, some of whom may be suspects in the shooting.
Jaffa was created by Leora Kamenetzky, who was one of the creators of False Flag (aka kfulim), one of the most addictive suspense series, and she knows how to introduce multiple characters, make them all instantly distinctive, and build suspense. I was hooked on Jaffa after five minutes.
The series uses the shooting to show that the delicate balance among the two communities in the coastal city can be easily upset and that the results of disturbing the fragile equilibrium can be explosive.
‘Zaguri’ – Hot 3, Hot VOD, Next TV
A beloved Israeli television series is returning this week for its third season: Zaguri, aka Zaguri Empire, which is running on Hot 3 on Thursdays, as well as Hot VOD and Next TV.
It’s been years since everyone’s favorite dysfunctional Mizrahi family last graced our screens and now they’re back, a bit older but no quieter – and, judging from the first episode, no wiser.
Created by Maor Zaguri, the series became a pop-culture phenomenon, and many saw themselves in the depiction of a working-class family in Beersheba. Others just tuned in because their over-the-top antics were funny.
This time, the Zaguri household faces a new crisis. The family is unraveling, with each member searching for a way out – or a way back in. Aviel (Oz Zehavi) is living at home again and struggling to pay his debts, which could take forever because his main occupation is performing his poems at a club – the one we see him read is, not surprisingly, all about his relationship with his mother.
But the big news is that the Zaguri patriarch, played in previous seasons by Moshe Ivgy, has disappeared, for a very good reason. In real life, Ivgy went to prison for indecent assault, and the show had to be reworked. It feels like he could walk back in at any minute, and his absence is handled cleverly.
The series works surprisingly well without him, and most of the original cast is back including Ninet Tayeb, Sarah von Schwarze, Israel Atias, Kobi Maimon, Yafit Asoulin, Daniel Sebag, Hila Harush, Hava Ortman, and Ori Laizarouvitch and Chen Amsalem Zaguri – who married the series’ creator after she was cast in the show. There are a couple of new characters, who fit right in.
For viewers who never saw or don’t remember the previous seasons, it’s surprisingly easy to get right into the swing of things, and English-speaking viewers will get a crash course in Hebrew slang. If that isn’t enough to get you motivated to see it, there’s also a surprise marriage proposal and a brit milah (circumcision).
‘The Newsreader’ and ‘Mrs. Playmen’
Two new Netflix series, both set decades ago, The Newsreader and Mrs. Playmen, look at very different types of journalism, but each is fun in its own way. The Newsreader tells the story of a television newsroom in Melbourne in the 1980s. It plays like a combination of the iconic James L. Brooks movie Broadcast News (1987) and an Aussie soap opera.
The series focuses on the complicated relationship between two newsreaders, the up-and-coming Dale (Sam Reid), who is conflicted over his attraction to men, and Helen (Anna Torv), a brilliant but unstable journalist who constantly runs afoul of her sexist boss, Lindsay (William McInnes).
Other important characters include Noelene (Michelle Lim Davidson), who is from a Korean family and fights her way up the ladder from a job as an assistant; Rob (Stephen Peacocke), a retired athlete who is only comfortable with sports reporting but who has been pushed into the news division; and Dennis (Chum Ehelepola), a manager who knows he can only go so far because of his Indigenous Australian ancestry.
The series weaves a narrative about their personal lives with the stories they are covering, and uses real events from Australian and world history, including the Challenger disaster, the Lindy Chamberlain case, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident, and a shooting in Melbourne. It’s very smart about the newsroom politics and how the media looked at stories back then.
Despite certain soapy tendencies, there are some clear homages to the wit of Broadcast News. These include a sequence where Dale must run through the hallway to bring video to the control room in those pre-Internet days, and the character of Rob, a clear nod to William Hurt’s telegenic but unsophisticated Tom Grunick in the film.
Mrs. Playmen is set in Rome in the early 1970s and is loosely based on the story of Adelina Tattilo (Carolina Crescentini), a Catholic mother who took over her husband’s erotic magazine when he fled the country to avoid prosecution for obscenity and financial mismanagement.
It’s about a bygone chapter in the world of magazine publishing and the story of a woman finding that she is not only far more competent than she believed but is actually quite powerful.
Breaking with the magazine’s tradition, she begins to appeal to a female audience by using photos of beautiful women who are not professional models and by publishing straight talk about women’s sexuality at a time when the subject was taboo in the public sphere.
The script is occasionally a little too on-the-nose, with clear political messages that are not that interesting, and the multiple stories of co-workers who become police informants for a government itching to shut down the publication become a bit repetitive. But you can’t beat the atmosphere, with plenty of shots of famous Roman sites, gorgeous fashions, and 1970s pop tunes.