Israel's most beloved actors star in new drama series

There is something to look forward to coming to Keshet 12 on February 18: A new drama series, The Best Worst Thing, starring two of Israel’s best-loved actors, Ayelet Zurer and Amos Tamam. Zurer, who has been a fixture of much of Israeli quality TV throughout the years, was one of the stars of Florentine, created by Eytan Fox in the late 90s, and went on to star in BeTipul and Prisoners of War, remade in the US as In Treatment and Homeland, respectively. She has also had an international movie career and starred opposite Tom Hanks in Angels & Demons, the sequel to The Da Vinci Code.

Recently, she starred as a female director who becomes obsessed with a young screenwriter in the dark, addictive Apple TV+ drama, Losing Alice. Tamam was the breakout star of the series, Srugim, about religious singles in Jerusalem, and he has become a star on the big screen and on stage, too.

In The Best Worst Thing, Zurer plays an oncologist who discovers she herself has cancer on the same day she diagnoses the disease in a rising politician, played by Tamam. A friendship develops between them, which, based on the trailer, looks as if it might develop into something more. While this might sound like a plotline on Grey’s Anatomy, with these two, it could turn out to be much more interesting and might even be the next Israeli series that gets remade around the world.

WHILE I’VE written about this subject before, I feel it is worth restating praise for the extremely high quality of the news features that are shown virtually every night on Israeli television. I sometimes find myself reluctant to stop watching them and turn on a drama series, because the true stories of tragedy and heroism are so compelling and so well told. These features are available after they air on the news channels’ websites. Just last week, the Keshet newsmagazine, Uvda (Fact), hosted by Ilana Dayan, showed a memorable feature about the harrowing experiences of Golani’s 13th battalion on October 7, which can still be viewed on mako.co.il/ 

What else is on TV in Israel?

A NEW adaptation of One Day, the bestselling novel by David Nicholls, is currently streaming on Netflix and although the structure of the novel lends itself to a series, sadly, this one is a disappointment. The book was already adapted into an enjoyable movie with two very appealing stars, Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, in 2011, and that movie is available in Israel on Apple TV+. The gimmick of the book is that two university students, Dexter, a guy from a privileged family, and Emma, an idealistic young woman who wants to change the world through the arts, meet on the night of their graduation. While their hookup doesn’t quite work out, they decide to stay friends, and the book follows them for a single day every year for 20 years, on the date of the night they met. Sometimes they are together and other times apart, but their connection endures as they go through a fairly entertaining – if somewhat predictable – series of personal and professional ups and downs in the novel. 

The new series emphasizes one of the weaknesses of the book, that at times it wasn’t clear why these two liked each other at all. You just have to accept that at the graduation party, Dexter (Leo Woodall, who played Jack on The White Lotus) and Emma (Ambika Mod, who was in This Is Going to Hurt) can’t keep their eyes off each other. There is zero chemistry or rapport between these two performers here, and while I made it through one episode, I didn’t feel any pull to keep tuning in. There are nice views of Scotland, where they are in university, the two actors look great, but that’s about it. I kept hoping that Emma’s background – Mod is the daughter of immigrants from India – was going to add something, but in the end, it just emphasized the ways in which he is more entitled than she. I doubt my reservations about the show will matter much to young viewers, who seem to be starved for any kind of romance and I imagine this will be a big hit. 

I TUNED in to Laura Chinn’s Suncoast (currently streaming in Israel on Disney+) because one of its cast members, Ariel Martin, aka Baby Ariel, a social-media influencer, just visited Israel to learn about the war and to meet with members of the hostage families. After interviewing her, I was curious to see her act. Martin is a natural as one of the classmates of Doris (Nico Parker, who won the Sundance award for Breakthrough Performance), a teen who is trying to make friends and live her life while her brother is dying of brain cancer. At first, it seems as if her classmates are a bunch of mean girls, but they turn out to be much more thoughtful than they appear. Martin is believable and appealing as a girl who can’t help saying exactly what is on her mind all the time but who has a good heart, a persona that will be familiar to her fans. 

I had thought I would just catch a few of Martin’s scenes and switch off this movie, but I got hooked. It’s a well-made indie film, a classic Sundance drama, and I think that both adult audiences and teens will enjoy it. Laura Linney plays the single mom who has spent years caring for her dying son and neglecting her daughter, and it’s one of her strongest performances in years – it even made me forget her as Wendy Byrde on Ozark. A twist in the story is that the hospice where Doris’s brother is admitted is the same one where Terri Schiavo was living at the end of her life. Schiavo, who had been in a persistent vegetative state for about 15 years, was at the center of a real-life court case when her husband wanted to have her feeding tube removed and her parents fought against that decision. The hospice is surrounded by protesters, which creates a circus-like atmosphere that is antithetical to the very notion of a restful hospice environment, and one of them, a man who seems a bit lost himself, befriends Doris. This protester is played by Woody Harrelson, giving an understated performance in an ensemble cast where everyone is quite good. The movie is a sensitive exploration of what it’s like to lose a loved one slowly, and how an impending loss affects everyone in a family in different ways.  

SOFIA VERGARA, the ditzy, sexy mom from Modern Family, proves she can play drama in the new Netflix series, Griselda, but after a few minutes, I was longing to see her again as Gloria Delgado-Pritchett from that sitcom. In Griselda, she plays a mother, fleeing an abusive drug dealer husband in Colombia, who comes to Miami in the 1970s to build a cocaine-dealing empire. It’s based on the true story of a female drug lord, who supposedly was the one person who scared Pablo Escobar. But this series kept reminding me of Weeds, a Showtime comedy with Mary-Louise Parker playing a widow with two kids, who starts selling pot so they can stay in their suburban community. The fun thing – one of the fun things – about Weeds was that her character reacted like an ordinary person to scenes of drug dealer mayhem, whereas Vergara is preternaturally composed – almost blank – at every moment. People must love stories about drug cartels because there are so many of them – you can also see Queen of the South with Alice Braga, on Netflix, as well as Narcos, the one that started it all.