The new Israeli series Bad Boy, which premiered in Israel last year on Hot and Next TV, just became available on Netflix in Israel and around the world. If you’ve been waiting to see it with English subtitles, now’s your chance.
The acclaimed series, which was produced by SIPUR and Tedy Productions, tells a tough story of a teen in the juvenile justice system. It was the big winner at the Israel Academy of Film and Television awards last month, taking home eight of them, including Best Drama Series.
Bad Boy is based on the early life of stand-up comedian Daniel Chen. He appears in it playing himself as a successful one who mines his tough adolescence for material and who worries when someone from his past comes back into his life.
Chen’s stand-up act is a framing device for the episodes. His gallows humor prevents Bad Boys from becoming too relentlessly grim as it tells the story of his childhood self, named Dean (Guy Manster, who gives such a great performance that it’s hard to believe he isn’t just playing himself, but he isn’t).
He is a resilient, likable kid who has been dealt a terrible hand in life, in the form of his mother, Tamara (Neta Plotnik), a drug addict whose erratic behavior is a nightmare for him and his younger brother to cope with.
Dean gets arrested for reasons that aren’t immediately clear and before he has spent even an hour in the prison, he is thrust into a situation that may either be his ticket out or may put his life, and the lives of his family, at risk.
Heli (Liraz Chamami, best known for Manayek) is excellent as the tough warden who wants to bring out the best in the boys in her care but knows they will likely spend much of their lives behind bars.
Havtamo Farda is one of the standouts in a terrific ensemble as the guy who is either the most trustworthy or most vicious inmate, depending on who is talking about him.
The series invites comparisons to The Wire and Orange is the New Black because of the subject matter, but even more because, just as in those two great series, your perceptions of the characters keep shifting.
It was created by a who’s who of the Israeli television industry, including Ron Leshem, a novelist who created both the Israeli and HBO versions of Euphoria, another series about teens with a dark vibe.
He was also one of the creators of Valley of Tears, the series about the Yom Kippur War, and two of his colleagues on that series – Daniel Amsel, and Amit Cohen – were co-creators of Bad Boy, along with Roee Florentin, Moshe Malka, and Hagar Ben-Asher (who also directed it).
I recently re-watched the series and it hasn’t lost any of its intensity, even when I knew what was coming. It will be interesting to see if audiences around the world embrace this drama, given the calls we have heard for cultural boycotts of Israel. My guess is that anyone who watches one episode will be hooked, no matter what political beliefs they hold.
A Complete Unknown – Disney+ and Hot VOD Cinema
If you missed the superb Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown in theaters, it’s now available to stream on Disney+ and will also be on Hot VOD Cinema starting on May 20. This is one of the only movies I’ve made time to see twice in recent years because it was so much fun, and any quibbles about how it fails to go into the politics of the folk-music movement in depth don’t detract in a major way from the experience of watching it.
Earth Abides – Hot VOD and HBO, Next TV
People must love dystopian drama series, because there are so many of them. If seeing a post-apocalyptic future attracts you, you might want to try Earth Abides, which is now available on Hot VOD and Next TV and begins airing on Hot HBO on May 14 at 10 p.m. It’s a less dark take than usual on the survival of humanity after an extinction event, in this case, a virus that rapidly kills nearly everyone in the world.
The series, which is based on a cult classic novel by George R. Stewart, plays like a cross between Station Eleven and the novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It doesn’t dwell on the pandemic that wiped out humanity, and all we learn is that “The government overcorrected,” explains one survivor. “They went too scary on the first one, played this one down” until it was too late.
She needs to explain this to Isherwood “Ish” Williams (Alexander Ludwig), a nerdy but stunning geologist who never lets saving the remnants of humanity interfere with his ab maintenance routine, because when the pandemic broke out, he was hiking in the woods for research and was bitten by a rattlesnake. He managed to treat the bite but was still out of commission for weeks. Once he recovered, the world had already gone to hell, and his parents and everyone else he knew were long gone.
Ish leaves his parents’ home in Berkeley and takes off in search of survivors, making a detour to Las Vegas, where he meets a woman and a man (Martin Donovan, of Weeds, Homeland, and so many other series and movies) who are drinking themselves to death in the eerie landscape, where an emergency generator still operates the bright lights.
Helpless to save them, he heads back to the Bay Area and makes a life for himself with a cute dog he finds. When he meets Emma (Jessica Frances Dukes), a woman who is as earthy as he is nerdy, they become survival partners and eventually lovers. Other survivors turn up after some time jumps, as this small band tries to repopulate the world.
This isn’t about good humans fighting with evil humans, as most such series tend to be, but more about the challenges of survival: creating a rudimentary power grid, raising chickens, hunting and fishing, and fighting wild animals, in one case (squeamish viewers should be warned) rats.
Based on the first three episodes that were released to critics, much of it will be a little slow for those who prefer their postapocalyptic world to be more action-packed, but the characters are appealing.
One interesting note about the book is that it is a philosophical novel that looks at the big questions about humanity. George R. Stewart was a historian who specialized in the history of place names, and most of his books were non-fiction. Earth Abides has several connections to the Jewish bible and Hebrew. The title comes from a line from Ecclesiastes, “Men go and come, but earth abides.”
It seems that it is no coincidence that the name of the hero, Ish, is related to the Hebrew word for man, or that the heroine, Emma, is called Em in the book, a variation on the Hebrew word for mother. Like McCarthy in The Road, Stewart reflected on the nature of civilization in Earth Abides, and perhaps this adaptation will encourage people to read the book, which is fascinating.
The Eternaut – Netflix
IF YOU like your dystopia served cold, try Netflix’s series, The Eternaut, which is set in Argentina and where people die when exposed to a toxic snow that suddenly starts falling in the summer. It features one of Argentina’s biggest stars, Ricardo Darin, who specializes in playing nice guys and was in Wild Tales and Son of the Bride. His quiet presence is always appealing.
The series balances the danger from the snow (which may remind you of the toxic rain in the Danish series The Rain) with the dangers of trusting the wrong survivors. It was based on a comic strip and goes off in a more sci-fi direction than Earth Abides.
If you’d like to watch a natural phenomenon that isn’t out to get you, you can try the third season of 100 Foot Wave, the docu-series that chronicles the life of Garrett McNamara and other big-wave surfers, and is available on Cellcom TV, Hot 8 (along with Hot VOD and Next TV), and Yes VOD and Sting+.
This season moves from Portugal to other locations around the world, including Hawaii, Morocco, and Italy. The series paints a portrait of McNamara, obviously an extremely driven person, that goes a little deeper than most surfing documentaries, and there’s something soothing about watching all these surfers master these seemingly deadly giant waves.
