Trust No One, the Keshet series that was delayed because of a major storyline that deals with Hamas, is now running Mondays after the news on Channel 12, and since the first episode has already aired, it’s now possible to discuss the plot.
If you haven’t seen the first episode and want to watch it, read no further, because it’s impossible to write about it without revealing spoilers. You can catch up with it on the Keshet website at mako.co.il. Trust No One was clearly inspired in part by the true story of Moab Hassan Yousef, the son of one of Hamas’s founders, who became an Israeli informant and has become an outspoken critic of the terror group.
The first episode opens in 2021 with Itamar Molcho (Yehuda Levi), the youngest head of Israel’s general security services agency (known as the Shin Bet) driving with his son, Dekel, a young man, through the desert
Pictures of Dekel from birth to young adulthood are shown as Molcho says, in voiceover, “Saving your child, even at the cost of your life, is the only sacrifice that is not a choice – it is an instinct.But what happens if there is something in the world that is more important to you than their life? Then, you are in trouble.”
Keshet's strange timing with Bar
It’s pretty understandable, given that setup, why Keshet chose to delay its release, and it’s strange timing that it has finally premiered when the current Shin Bet head, Ronen Bar, is the focus of so much controversy. The scene moves to a celebration of the elite echelon of the security agency in Molcho’s home, which is interrupted by a crisis – as we know from Fauda that all happy occasions of elite security units always are.
Molcho and his comrades get the news that there has been a WikiLeaks-type document dump. Avatars online identify Molcho’s most important informant, Shuruk Atta (Luna Mansour), the daughter of one of Hamas’s leaders, who has been working with him since she was a teenager.
Molcho’s wife, Dorit (Mali Levi), starts clearing the table as he and his colleagues immediately try to rescue Atta, pulling out their dedicated phones and a portable computer that can follow the young woman’s every move through Gaza, and can even send drones to help her. She is a young mother who is terrified and blindsided by news of the leak. With Molcho’s help, she slips away under the nose of her scandalized father.
MUCH OF the rest of the episode is a tense cat-and-mouse game, as Hamas members try to block her every possible route of escape.
Atta is no damsel in distress, and brandishes a firearm to get a reluctant acquaintance to help her flee. These scenes are the highlight of the episode.
Less successful is a pivot to Yali (Yael Elkana), a cyber mastermind once imprisoned in the US for some kind of spyware scandal, whom Molcho must persuade to help him. It seems implausible that only she is smart enough to figure out how their cyber network was compromised, and it’s likely that her glamorous character’s main function will be to provide romantic and sexual tension as the series continues.
While the chase scenes will keep you on the edge of your seat, the series faces a fundamental obstacle. Watching it, it’s hard to not wonder why, if Israeli intelligence really was able to observe every corner of Gaza so clearly in 2021, Hamas was able to carry out such a devastating attack on October 7, 2023.
The series is grounded in the October 6 mentality of thinking that Israel had a firm grasp of what Hamas was up to. This is what the Israeli public was told by political and military leaders, so it’s not surprising that the series portrays the brutal terrorist group in this light.
But every day, as more information about military and intelligence failures is released, the version of reality that Trust No One presents looks more like wishful thinking. This contrast with our current reality is an elephant in the room for anyone who follows the news.
The creators of Trust No One include some of the Israel’s best-known television creators, among them Ron Leshem (Euphoria), Amit Cohen (False Flag), Daniel Amsel (Valley of Tears), and Ofir Lobel (Black Space), who also directed the series, so perhaps its plot will make more sense during this war as the season progresses.
3rd Rock from the Sun – Yes VOD, Sting+ and Comedy
If you’d like to head to a galaxy far, far away and still have some laughs, you’ll be pleased to learn that all six seasons of 3rd Rock from the Sun are available now on Yes VOD and Sting+, as well as on the Yes Comedy channel.
I wondered how well 3rd Rock would hold up after about three decades. The good news is that it’s still very funny, as long as you can disregard the sitcom conventions that most of us don’t have patience for any more like the laugh track.
It’s the story of a group of aliens sent to earth to blend in and report on life here, by pretending to be a typical suburban family. John Lithgow is a great deadpan comedian and he’s perfect as their commander, while Kristen Johnston gets a lot of the laughs as a security expert who learns what it’s like to occupy the body of a sexy blonde woman, and a very young Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays an elderly scientist and leader forced to go to high school.
The comedy really comes from making fun of how we earthlings behave, and as they try to explain human life to each other, it reminded me, in the best way, of the scenes when the more socially aware characters try to teach Sheldon how to act in The Big Bang Theory.
Galaxy Quest, Spaceballs – Apple: + and TV+
If you’d like to continue the funny outer-space vibe, you can see the 1999 movie Galaxy Quest on Apple+. It’s about the cast of a 1970s sci-fi show (that will make you think of Star Trek) who are barely getting by signing autographs at sci-fi conventions.
Through a set of circumstances that seem more plausible, they meet their biggest fans – aliens who have found a way to watch their show in space and don’t realize that it’s fictional – and are beamed aboard a spaceship and sent to save the aliens from an evil warlord. The joke is that their alien fans think they’re superheroes.
Galaxy Quest has an incredible cast. Tim Allen plays the actor who portrays the Captain Kirk-like figure, Alan Rickman is a Shakespearean actor who can’t appreciate the success he’s had as the Mr. Spock-type and is filled with self-loathing as he spouts the fans’ favorite taglines, and Sigourney Weaver is the wisecracking blonde who plays the sexy computer specialist.
If you want even more laughs in space, Apple TV+ also features Mel Brooks’ 1987 Star Wars parody Spaceballs, the tagline for which is, “May the Schwartz be with you,” and which features Brooks, John Candy, and Rick Moranis.
The White Lotus – Hot, Yes, Cellcom TV
Something fun and unexpected came up in the fourth episode of The White Lotus, which is showing on Hot, Yes, and Cellcom TV, and is set in a spa/resort in Thailand: a tune familiar to Israeli Eurovision fans played, “A-Ba-Ni-Bi,” the first Israeli song to win the European song contest, but in a Thai version.
Ynet reported that Nurit Hirsch, who composed the music, and Ofra Manor, daughter of the song’s late lyricist Ehud Manor, were contacted by representatives of The White Lotus and gave their permission for one of several Thai versions of the song to be played.
According to Hirsch, the song has been a hit all over Asia, especially in Taiwan. It was performed on Eurovision by Izhar Cohen in 1978 and became a worldwide hit, although Hirsch said she hadn’t received royalties from the Asian versions, “Otherwise, I’d be a very wealthy woman.”
The White Lotus is full of so many portents, that fans might be forgiven for thinking that the inclusion of Israel’s first Eurovision winner might have foreshadowed some other Israel-related plot development.
But the fifth episode came and went without any more Israeli tunes, and the most Israeli thing about the series remains Jason Isaacs, a British actor whose parents and other family members moved to Herzliya years ago.
Isaacs has one of his best roles in years as Timothy Ratliff, an American businessman caught up in an illegal trading scheme who is at the end of his rope.
