Suspenseful cop show, a soothing soap, and 'Table for Eight'

It’s hard to talk about the finale of the third season of the Kan series, Manayek (all seasons of the series are available on the Kan website kan.org.il) without giving major spoilers, but the current season of this drama about police corruption lived up to the promise of the first two, and then some.

Created by Roy Iddan and Yoav Gross, Manayek is the kind of hard-hitting series with nail-biting suspense and perfectly cast actors that epitomizes the high-quality TV that has made Israel a television powerhouse around the world.

It also has an overarching theme – how decent people can lose their moral compass, and as the third season unfolds, it becomes almost a kind of morality play. 

Shalom Assayag reprises his role as Izzy Bachar, the doggedly honest but sometimes ineffectual police detective. Amos Tamam, currently also starring in The Best Worst Thing on Keshet (more on that later), plays Barak Harel, another police detective, who thinks he can cut a few corners but gets in way over his head. If you haven’t followed the series, catch up on it now, and if you enjoy crime drama, you’ll get hooked. 

The Best Worst Thing, the drama running on Keshet 12 on Monday nights after the news, is the nighttime soap we need right now. Tamam, officially the hardest-working man in Israeli show business now, plays Micah Hadad, an up-and-coming politician whom many believe will be the next prime minister. But he has been diagnosed with breast cancer, which is rare in men and which he worries will turn him into a laughing stock and derail his career.

No more claiming ignorance about Chanel's Nazi collaboration

He is operated on by Amalia (Ayelet Zurer), a leading Tel Aviv cancer surgeon. Amalia, something of a control freak, is a great doctor but a bad patient. When it turns out that she, too, has breast cancer, she refuses to talk to her doctor/mentor (Hana Laslo), about scheduling a date for her operation. 

Amalia has a complicated relationship with her ex (Zohar Strauss), a daughter coping with an unplanned pregnancy, and a stand-up comedian sister (Nelly Tagar), who pretends to have cancer so she won’t be fired for not being funny enough. 

After the first two episodes, Amalia hasn’t fallen in love with Micah yet, but they are on a soapy track heading for each other. If you’re looking for something subtle and unusual, you can skip this, but if you just want to spend an hour a week with good-looking people with compelling problems, there’s much to enjoy here. 

When your aunt managed to score the perfect Chanel knockoff at a Loehmann’s department store, she probably had no idea that the designer, Coco Chanel, whose work was being copied, was a Nazi collaborator who cooperated with Hitler’s Parisian henchmen in every way she could to advance her career.

But you can no longer claim any such ignorance, because the series on Apple TV+, The New Look, examines at Chanel’s repugnant wartime activities in great detail. The series focuses on the rivalry between two greats of the French fashion industry: Chanel, played by the always appealing Juliette Binoche, which makes it hard to hate her, although you will, and Christian Dior, a far more sympathetic figure, portrayed by Ben Mendelsohn, who was Danny on Bloodline. 

The series moves through different timelines, mainly between the mid-1950s, when Dior and Chanel faced off for dominance in French haute couture; and World War II, when Dior reluctantly helped his sister, a committed resistance fighter, and her comrades, although he, too, designed clothes for Nazis’s wives.

Apart from her Nazi sympathies, Chanel is shown as a narcissistic opportunist, albeit one who had a strong vision of creating sporty clothes for active women, while Dior is more introspective, more of an artist. 

I always hope that series and movies about the fashion world are going to be fun, but most of the recent ones have been glacially paced and overly tasteful, as if designing expensive clothes were such a high-minded affair that everything about it just has to be dull. There is currently a series on Disney+ called Cristobal Balenciaga, about the Spanish designer, who is a minor character in The New Look, which was also slow and hard to get into. 

THE MOST gripping show I have seen in the past week was not a fictional drama, but a segment on the Keshet program, Uvda (Fact), created by Ilana Dayan and presented by Ben Shani, about Avigail Mor Idan, the three-year-old kidnapped to Gaza on October 7 from Kibbutz Kfar Aza after her parents were killed. 

Now, you may think you know all about her, and while you likely are familiar with the basic facts, her story, masterfully told by Shani, is a microcosm of everything tragic and wonderful that has happened in Israel since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.

The segment, called “Table for Eight,” is the story of the tragic end of her former life, with the sudden murder of her parents, photographer Roee Idan, who was holding her in his arms when he was shot, after her mother, Smadar Mor Idan, who worked for the General Security Services, was killed. 

It is also about how she became world famous when she was kidnapped to Gaza along with her neighbors, with even US President Joe Biden calling for her release. 

And it’s about the social worker who stayed on the phone with her older brother and sister as they hid in a closet for about 12 hours, and how the social workers had to make decisions like whether to tell a young boy to walk past the dead body of his mother to get a phone charger so she could stay on the line with him. 

And it’s about her aunt and her uncle, a restaurateur originally from Hungary who realized and then lost his dream of bringing Tel Aviv-style cuisine to the Gaza border communities, and who adopted Avigail and her siblings and are raising them alongside their three children.

Again, you may have heard parts of this story before, but it is filmed and presented as gracefully as an epic movie of loss and redemption. It can be seen on www.mako.co.il/ and several clips with English subtitles are available at https://stand4israel.net/channel/Keshet+-+N12/320089972

THERE IS a lot coming up in March, including Elsbeth (a spinoff of The Good Wife, a drama about a political wife whose husband is caught cheating on her very publicly), which begins running on Yes VOD on March 1 and then will begin running on Yes TV Drama on March 21. 

It stars Carrie Preston, who made such a big impression in a small part on The Good Wife as Elsbeth Tascioni, the entertainingly eccentric and brilliant lawyer, who stood out as both hysterically funny and endearing in a very quirky and talented ensemble. 

Some of her greatest moments involved her reducing a panel of Francophone international sports judges to jelly by playing them off against each other, and getting “Call Me Maybe” stuck in her head in a way that impaired her judgment. 

Elsbeth will be the second spinoff from The Good Wife, the first of which, The Good Fight, dealt with Diane Lockhart, one of the senior attorneys played by Christine Baranski, who joins a mostly African-American firm early after Donald Trump is elected president. The Good Fight is excellent, which makes me a little apprehensive about Elsbeth because I’m not sure if a second spinoff from an original series has ever been any good. 

The only series with two spinoffs I can think of was The Mary Tyler Moore Show; its first spinoff, Rhoda, was lots of fun for a few seasons, while its second spinoff, Phyllis, didn’t measure up. But if anyone can buck this trend, it could be Elsbeth – and Preston.