1. Aviram Katz
A drama-comedy-detective series from the creator of Dana Moden (“That’s how it is”, “Ananda”) and Eitan Tzur (“The Chamber Five”, “The Burghers” as well as “Red Band” and “The Good Cop”), a dream tag team of two creators The best TV we have around. It belongs to a very difficult television genre to perform, where the balance between tension, drama and comedy has to be perfect for the business to work. You saw it work amazingly in “Only Murders in the Building”, you saw it crash badly in “The Woman from the House Across from the Girl in the Window”, and after watching the first episode we are happy to announce that there is a good situation in “Aviram Katz”, the business is working: a writer in a writing crisis steals a story from his home the proctologist, and becomes a suspect in a police investigation surrounding the disappearance of the main character in the stolen story who turns out to be a real woman, while at the same time the neighbor also disappears. The police give him 48 hours to help solve the mystery before he is arrested as the main suspect in it. Light on the one hand, a bit Stephen Kingy on the other, a pleasure on the third.
What may very well make her your favorite candy in the coming weeks is her great live-action cast, starring Yehezkel Lazarov in the great role of Rashe Adir, the always excellent Sasson Gabai, Dana Moden and Viniv Beaton who do a wonderful duet as the exhausted police investigators, and also Joy Rieger, Mittal Raz, Ala Deka, Hagar Ben Asher, Gila Almagor Agmon, Shai Avivi and many more who are expected to emerge throughout the season. If the mystery at the center of the series, based on Asher Kravitz’s book “Writing Like God”, manages to hold its eight short episodes (30 minutes each), here 11 will be able to mark another serious “V” on their belt. The attempt by the anti-Israeli Netanyahu government to damage this excellent art house seems more absurd and outrageous than ever this evening.
2. In the Jewish state
Quietly, almost without anyone noticing, the archives of the public broadcasting corporation “Kan” uploaded to its servers a lost item from the not-so-distant history of Israeli television – the documentary series by Modi Bar On and Anat Seltzer on the history of Israeli humor, “In the State of the Jews”. All eleven episodes of the series are up to the archive site of “Kan”, as well as the HereBox app. True, it was possible to find episodes of the series from 2004 scattered sporadically on the Internet, but this is the first time that everything is available online to the general public.
And this is wonderful news for everyone who knows the series and really wanted to see it (rewatching is highly recommended, you will enjoy it), but really great news for those who have never heard of the documentary program, or seen the style of presentation that is so characteristic of Bar on Zel. In an award-winning and appreciated documentary that manages to outline in a clear, interesting and entertaining narrative the history of Israeli humor, starting from the moment we came here to laugh, then to the end of the series, the beginning of the 2000s, in an episode appropriately called “Not yet ripe and already rotten”, and deals with television the mainstream.
3. Junji Ito: Grave Tales from Japan
Junji Ito’s name may not be exactly a name that is known in every household in Israel, but those who have been exposed to his disturbing, disturbed and simply creepy creations already know what is going to come now – and those who don’t, are going to either fly over what they will now know or run to the side The second. It’s been nearly 40 years since Ito, an acclaimed manga creator (he’s the first Japanese creator to win a major category of the prestigious Eisner Award – more or less the Pulitzer of comics), just hasn’t let the Japanese sleep properly at night – and now he has his own anime anthology On Netflix to enter your nightmares as well.
His horror manga can be as brutal and violent as an early David Cronenberg film but at the same time as absurd and cruel as a Franz Kafka short story, and among his loyal fans is another creator who recently won his own horror anthology on Netflix – Guillermo del Toro. So true, the animation based on Ito’s illustrations is a little, but a little, less frightening in color than in his haunting black and white (as is customary in the genre), but “Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre” maintains the explosive pace of his work . Chapters here end quickly, sometimes scenes are cut in a somewhat confusing way – but that’s part of the point. Because Ito is not that interested in giving answers to the questions he scatters, nor is it necessarily that you will follow the plot one hundred percent. It is much more a matter of feeling, of experience, of images that will not leave you for a long time.
4. Poker face
We haven’t seen such a series in a long time: its creator is Rian Johnson, the brilliant mind behind “Well Written Murder”, in his first foray into television. Starring Natasha Lyonne (“Russian Doll”), alongside the wonderful Adrien Brody, Lou Diamond Phillips, Ron Perlman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Birkin, Chloe Sabini, Nick Nolte, Luis Guzman, Judith Light, Jamila Jamil and many more familiar faces of senior Hollywood actors. But what we really haven’t seen on television in a long time is not this A-list, but a series in which each episode has its own story with a beginning, middle and end, like television used to be.
“Poker Face” appeared last Thursday on NBC/Universal’s fast-growing streaming service, Peacock, and is considered one of the most interesting series of 2023. The first season contains ten episodes of approximately 75 minutes each, with all episodes in the successful seventies Howcatchem format, with a structure A plot where at the beginning of the episode you see or hear how the crime was committed, then you follow the detective who tries to solve the mystery, and at the end you catch the bad guy. Rian Johnson, who also wrote the first and last episode of the season, said that he received the inspiration for the series from the shows he saw as a child, primarily “Columbo”, “Magnum” and “The Leap to Yesterday”, which are all also “little anthropological jumps to areas of the United States that you don’t usually see on television “. .
5. The last of us
The successful series of the period is still the one created as a result of a computer game about zombies infected by a fungus. In the second episode our heroes set out on their long journey, the series began to carve out a separate identity for itself and we finally meet some zombies. That’s why we launched Recap of the last of uswith a full breakdown of the events of the chapter, interpretation of the events, comparison to the computer game and, of course, plenty of spoilers so let’s read it later.