'Sovietzka,' 'The Bear,' 'Painkiller': What's new to watch on Israeli TV

Russians on Israeli television have often been the butt of jokes, but Sovietzka, an entertaining and touching new series on KAN 11, chronicles their struggles and also gives us some laughs.

The series runs on Sundays and Thursdays at 9:45 p.m. and is also available on the KAN website (kan.org.il). It is not the immigrant story that we’re used to but a second-generation series about a university student, played by Suzanna Papian, who was born in Israel to a Russian family. She is “Anya” at home but “Anat” to her friends. Uncomfortable with her heritage at first, she refuses even to answer a Russian-speaking woman at a bus stop because she doesn’t want a cute guy who is also waiting there to know she speaks the language.

A math whiz, she is the hope of her parents (Evgenia Dodina, one of Israel’s leading actresses, and Gera Sandler, who played Marc Chagall in Transatlantic), and lives in Beit She’an with her grandmother. Her brother, Stas (Daniel Styopin of Checkout), has just had his first baby with his scarily perfect wife (Lena Fraifeld of Valeria is Getting Married) but is conflicted over whether to give his son a brit milah (circumcision). 

Anat/Anya struggles over whether to read her writing at an open-mic night at a club. She also resists joining a math team at the university because she sees it as a stereotypically Russian thing to do. But when her father admits he has lost his job and can’t figure out how to receive unemployment benefits, she goes to help him. When she sees the dismissive and discriminatory treatment he receives from the National Insurance clerk, she gets fired up and tells him off in a rant that goes viral. Initially, she is embarrassed, but eventually she is able to make this a first step to embracing her heritage.

Suzanna Papian is terrific in the main role and is fast on her way to becoming one of Israel’s biggest stars. She also has the lead, opposite Adir Miller, in the upcoming Avi Nesher movie, The Monkey House, and was nominated for an Ophir Award for her first major film role. She’s beautiful, yet she can be convincing as a young woman who is insecure about just about everything, and she is fun to watch in whatever role she is playing.

Watching The Bear on Disney Plus

AT THE end of the first season of The Bear, the deliciously entertaining series available here on Disney Plus (also through Yes), Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), the gifted chef who is the hero, came across some money unexpectedly. He, of course, decided to turn the family sandwich joint, which was nearly run into the ground by his late brother, Michael (Jon Bernthal of The Walking Dead, seen on The Bear only in flashbacks), into a fine dining establishment.

The second season of The Bear is about how he and the rest of the crew go about doing that and, at 10 episodes (two more than the first season), it meanders a little on the way, but is every bit as wonderful as the first season. I came late to the series because I have an aversion to cooking shows. I hate the faux-seriousness with which judges on these reality shows pronounce a dish sublime, and the mean-spiritedness with which they criticize food that isn’t up to their standards. 

The Bear, however, is a drama that is about much more than which dish turns out right. To put it another way, it’s about running a restaurant the way The Sopranos was about gangsters; it is and it isn’t. Of course, the unique restaurant kitchen setting is fascinating: the constant pressure to produce tasty food, the dangers of the cramped quarters, the slang, and the crazy co-workers. It may remind you of Anthony Bourdain’s breakout memoir, Kitchen Confidential. But it’s also about trying to transcend the baggage of a very dysfunctional family and finding grace in your working life, two themes that resonate with so many people.

Season two is a kind of Murphy’s Law primer of what needs to be done before a restaurant can open. It also deepens the stories of many of the characters. In the sixth episode, we get a full-episode flashback to a Christmas dinner from hell at the Berzatto household five years earlier, with Jamie Lee Curtis deliriously playing Michael and Carmy’s alcoholic mother, and Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Paulson, and John Mulaney as various other relatives. Back in the present, the staff members all branch out and spend time working at different places. 

In an especially interesting episode, Marcus (Lionel Boyce) goes to Copenhagen to study with a pastry chef at Noma, the restaurant named the best in the world several times, where Carmy learned much of his trade. The perfectionist Sydney (Ayo Edebiri, an extraordinarily winning actress) frets over the new restaurant’s menu and gets advice from her father (Robert Townsend) and from the line cook, Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas), who is ecstatic over her promotion to sous chef. The one plotline that doesn’t quite succeed is a romance for Carmy.

By the end of season two, I found myself with a hankering for a bite of an elaborate dish Marcus invents: a savory cannoli that reflects the personalities and tastes of everyone on staff of the restaurant. It may make you wish for dishes you can only find on this inventive TV show.

Without meaning to, I got hooked on Painkiller, the new Netflix series which presents a fictionalized drama based on the story of OxyContin, the Sackler family, and the opioid epidemic. There have been numerous documentaries and series about this issue recently, so not wanting to invest in watching another one is understandable, but a still-unresolved case was in the headlines again last week.

Another reason to watch is that Painkiller stars Matthew Broderick and Uzo Aduba (Orange is the New Black). It was an interesting choice to cast Broderick, who will perhaps always be best known for his performance as the adorable but cocky Ferris Bueller, as Richard Sackler, one of the great villains of recent history. Broderick plays the part as if anesthetized and almost disappears into it. 

Perhaps that’s the only way to play Sackler, a man who encouraged the over-prescription of a drug so dangerous, it killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Any touch of Broderick’s usual playfulness and likability would be out of place in this series. Aduba, on the other hand, is likable as a dogged investigator. On some level, we’ve seen all this before, but I couldn’t look away. Each episode is introduced by a real family who lost a loved one to the opioid epidemic.

If you’re looking for something a bit lighter, you might want to try The Twelve. It’s an Australian remake of a Belgian series about a jury in a murder case that stars Sam Neill as the defense lawyer, and is now running on Hot VOD and Next TV. I enjoyed the first episodes, but it is a little overly theatrical at times. If you just want pure fun, I recommend Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, on Hot and Yes.