Check out 'Chef' and some Nordic Noir on Israeli TV

If you are a fan of the Yes series, The Chef, you will be happy to know its second season will be available December 31 on Yes VOD and Sting TV, with episodes shown on Yes TV Drama on Sundays at 10 p.m. The first two episodes of the new season will be shown one after the other.

It’s a series that follows the worldwide fascination with the inner workings of restaurant kitchens, a milieu portrayed recently and very successfully in The Bear. But The Chef shows a kitchen with a distinctly Israeli flavor, and the bluntness and competitiveness here make the kitchens we’ve seen in other dramas look like a tea party.

Nimrod (Guri Alfi) is a hi-tech worker who was laid off, and he takes his bruised ego to a restaurant run by the monomaniacal Dori (Gal Toren). As we know from The Bear and many other shows, the high-pressure atmosphere of a high-end restaurant is a place with a rigid hierarchy, where egos rage out of control. Somehow, the unqualified but determined Nimrod managed to hold his own in this environment in the first season.

The second season picks up about two years after the first ended, and Nimrod has established himself as a valuable professional cook, but is hitting the glass ceiling because he is seen as someone who is too old and who started too late to make it to the top.  

Dori is now a celebrity TV chef without a restaurant and decides to open a new place. Despite everything, Nimrod joins him. Naturally, there is a new woman in Nimrod’s life, but the kitchen antics tend to trump the personal drama in this watchable series. 

A violent, suspenseful Norwegian Nordic Noir series available in Israel

IF YOU FEEL up to watching a suspenseful crime series with violent scenes, the Norwegian Nordic Noir series, Wisting, became available on Hot VOD and Next TV on December 27, and will begin broadcasting episodes on Hot HBO on Sundays at 10 p.m. starting on January 14.

Like pretty much all Nordic Noir dramas, it opens with police making a grisly discovery on a snow-covered landscape. In this case, they find a body on a Christmas tree farm. 

It turns out this body is linked to an American serial killer, and police detective William Wisting (Sven Nordin) teams up with an FBI agent (Carrie-Anne Moss of The Matrix franchise) to solve what turns out to be a string of gruesome crimes. Wisting’s journalist daughter (Thea Green Lundberg) also gets involved. 

This series doesn’t rise to the level of The Bridge, which is, for many, the high-water mark of the genre, but it’s very well done. 

Wisting is a far better series than another crime drama, the Netflix series, The Golden Hour, which is set in Amsterdam and tells the story of a police detective who came to The Netherlands as an immigrant from Afghanistan and tries to do his job while the top brass suspects him of having terrorist connections. 

There are a few twists, but most of this series is heavy-handed and dull. It might seem from the promos that another Netflix series, Obliterated, about a squad of super-hero intelligence agents trying to save Las Vegas from a terror attack, would actually be a lot of fun. But it follows the snark-plus-action formulas of such outlandish and unengaging movies as Heart of Stone. 

Obliterated adds some sex scenes that would get an R-rating at the movies, and a lot of cocaine and tequila to emphasize that it is all taking place in Vegas. But none of it is either suspenseful or really entertaining, and you may find yourself sympathizing with the nerdy computer genius who complains that the loud techno-pop music gives him headaches. 

IF YOU ARE looking for something that is funny and relatable, try the Netflix movie, The Price of Family. It’s an Italian film about two dutiful parents who come down with a bad case of empty-nest syndrome after their self-involved adult children move to Rome and seem to forget all about them. 

To lure them back, the parents (aided by a big-mouthed grandmother) come up with a ridiculous scheme: They pretend to have inherited a huge sum of money, and suddenly their children can’t see them enough. 

It all gets very silly, but that’s the point. The best scenes show how the parents pick up fake watches and garish clothes at a flea market, which they pass off as designer duds, and how they talk to their children as they think eccentric nouveau riche people would.

But The Price of Family has a real but sad message about what people will do for money and most of us will see a little of ourselves in some of the characters. Christian De Sica, the son of master neorealist director, Vittoria De Sica, stars as the father. 

IT’S THAT time for critics to make up their year-end 10-best lists, and while it is disappointing that the movie I most enjoyed this year, the screen adaptation of the classic Judy Blume novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, never opened in theaters in Israel, it is available through Apple TV+. 

Like the novel, which helped so many girls through their preteen years, it’s a tender and often funny coming-of-age story. It also has a serious but not preachy subplot about Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson), the daughter of a Christian mother (Rachel McAdams), whose family disapproved of her marriage and turned away from her, and a Jewish father (Benny Safdie), whose mother (Kathy Bates), disapproved of his marriage but embraced her granddaughter.

In addition to her universal adolescent worries, Margaret tries to figure out which religion speaks to her, a dilemma that so many people cope with, but rarely portrayed on screen. 

Newcomer director Kelly Fremon Craig has made a lively movie that is faithful to the book but will also work for people who haven’t read it. Sadly, the movie isn’t getting the Oscar buzz it deserves, but it’s well worth seeing.