Back to ‘Normal’, ‘Elsbeth’ arrives and ‘Fool Me Once’ flourishes

People think of the teen years as a time that is especially difficult, but the early 20s, when young people are on their own for the first time, are often the most challenging time of life and certainly when people tend to make their worst mistakes.

The powerful Israeli series Normal, which was shown on Hot a few years ago and is now on Netflix, looks at a particularly troubled young man going through a tough time, and it’s extremely well done. Created by Asaf Korman and Leore Dayan, the son of actor/director Assi Dayan, it is based on the story of a psychotic break he had in his 20s, when he was a struggling journalist.

Noam Ashkenazi, played by Roy Nik, who just won an Ophir Award for his role in the upcoming movie Home, is burning through pack after pack of Ritalin and growing more paranoid by the hour as he tries to write a column. He ends up under his desk, calling his father, a legendary cultural figure, much like Assi Dayan, played by Rami Heuberger, who knows a thing or two about psychosis and has Noam hospitalized in a psychiatric facility. It’s not easy to watch, but it’s interesting how the staff and the other patients slowly start to help him heal.

I appreciated the series’ unromanticized look at mental illness and its ability to put you inside Noam’s head. It also features some excellent writing, especially in the scenes that establish and develop the relationship between father and son. “Look around you, Noam. You’re in an amusement park for writers. Stop being afraid; take the rides!” his father counsels him. 

My trepidation about Elsbeth, the latest Good Wife spinoff, which is running on Yes VOD and will begin showing on Yes TV Drama on March 21, turned out to be justified. It’s cutesier and less suspenseful than the original series, and the eccentric Elsbeth Tascioni character has been made to act in a way that used to be called kooky, meaning she seems a little out of it. I looked up clips from her early appearances on The Good Wife, and the writing was simply much better.

She was a quirky but brilliant lawyer, figuring out criminals’ scams and corrupt politicians’ machinations that no one else could even imagine. Unfortunately, in the new series, she seems no brighter than anyone else, and the detectives she is working with seem particularly dim. The series is set in New York, where Elsbeth seems to charm everyone by wearing a foam Statue of Liberty crown. By contrast, when The Good Wife had an episode set in the Big Apple, there was a running joke about how Elsbeth was accosted by one of those people in Times Square dressed as a cartoon character, who inexplicably calls her a “dirty Jew.” It’s easy to see which version of New York is funnier and truer.

That said, it’s still entertaining to see Carrie Preston playing this character, whose superpower, according to the actress in a recent appearance on Stephen Colbert, is “being underestimated.” The supporting cast features a wealth of talent from TV’s current golden age, notably Wendell Pierce, who, for many of us, will always be Bunk from The Wire; he plays a police captain here. The principal suspect in the pilot episode, an arrogant college theater professor, is played by Stephen Moyer, who was Vampire Bill in True Blood. While Elsbeth is far from perfect, Good Wife fans will enjoy it, and we can hope that the writing gets smarter as it goes on.

There are so many glossy thriller series on Netflix that it’s hard to keep track of them, especially because most are so forgettable. I’m not sure how long I’ll remember the series Fool Me Once but watching it is certainly enjoyable.

Based on a Harlan Coben novel, it tells the story of Maya Stern (Michelle Keegan, who played Tina on Coronation Street for six years), a combat pilot whose career was derailed by a scandal when she was accused of making a mistake that cost many innocent civilian lives. As the series opens, her husband and sister, who worked together for a pharmaceutical company, were both killed in separate incidents under suspicious circumstances.

Maya is still in the British Air Force, but she is a flight instructor, trying to raise her toddler daughter and cope with her grief. Her in-laws, especially her imposing, upper-class psychiatrist mother-in-law (Joanna Lumley of Absolutely Fabulous), are not very supportive, to put it mildly. But Maya keeps it together until she sees her dead husband, very much alive, on nannycam footage. This is not a spoiler; it’s in the show’s description.

As is usually the case in a show like this, everyone is a suspect ,and there are two dogged detectives on the case: Sami Kierce (Adeel Akhtar, who was in the opposites-attract drama Ali & Ava), a recovering alcoholic who is about to marry his pregnant girlfriend, and Marty McGreggor (Dino Fetscher), who is annoyingly young and eager. Something about the dynamics between the two detectives and the heroine’s name gave me the feeling that the book was set in New York rather than in the UK, and it turns out that it was. However, the story transfers pretty seamlessly. It’s one of those series where there is a twist about every 20 minutes, and it’s really fun to guess who can and who can’t be trusted.

'Hysterically funny'

It also has an appealing cast. I’m so used to Joanna Lumley being hysterically funny from AbFab, but she’s quite good as the mother-in-law from hell. It’s the first Netflix series in a long time that I enjoyed so much that I made time to binge it, which is saying something.