'Dismissed,' crime capers, and more – What's new on TV in Israel?

Dismissed is a series that celebrates strong female soldiers, but also makes fun of them, and it was just announced that it will be returning to Kan 11 for its third season on September 2, with a double episode. After that, single episodes will run every Monday and Wednesday after the news.

The series is a comedy-drama about Noa (Alona Sa’ar), a very square female officer, and the recruits who try to take advantage of her: at-risk youth in the first season and university students in the second. These often petty politics mirror power struggles in every office, school, and institution, and you root for Noa even when she drives you crazy.

The storyline that dominated the final episodes of season two – which aired almost two years ago – was about Tuli (Noam Lugassy), the officer who challenged Noa for dominance but then had to deal with a scandal when a photo of her in her underwear was shared throughout the base. At first, Noa hesitated to do all she could, but eventually she went after the culprit full-force. 

The new season, which according to Kan will be the last, picks up five months later, when the company competes in an army-wide competition for excellence, which is obviously designed to cause Noa maximum stress. The series has been filled with wonderful performances, down to the smallest roles, so expect more of the same in season three. The first two seasons are available on Netflix in Israel, but with Hebrew titles, while abroad it can be seen on Netflix with English titles. Perhaps the best part of this series is that no matter how annoying your co-workers may be, Noa has it a lot worse with hers.

Emily in Paris – Netflix

The end of August can be a tough time: it’s hot, kids are on what seems like an endless vacation, and this year, a lot of vacations abroad have been canceled. Television and streamers are trying to help us through it by sending a lot of the lowest-common denominator reality shows our way, many of which feature young, toned, and tan people in skimpy bathing suits. You already know if you want to watch these, so there’s really no need for me to write about them. To paraphrase John Lennon, whatever gets you through the end of the summer (especially this summer) is alright.

But if you want to watch something where people wear a little bit more clothing, season four of Emily in Paris is being released August 15 on Netflix. A preview was not made available to local critics, but based on the trailer, it’s more of the same: a tech-savvy American girl (Lily Collins) shakes up a staid Parisian public-relations firm, while having romantic misadventures with gorgeous, bland men. 

The fashionable and sometimes outrageous clothes are the thing here, as are the gorgeous cast and beauty of the City of Light. While it isn’t so dumb that it will actually kill brain cells, you don’t need to pause it if you get a phone call, just turn down the sound, because how it looks is more important than what anyone says. 

They used to make a lot of old movies where the light rom-com plot was just an excuse to show beautiful actresses in fancy clothes – especially during the Great Depression, when so many Americans struggled with dire poverty – and this is very much in that tradition.

Elmore Leonard crime comedies – Apple TV+, Disney+

When you’re looking for entertainment that isn’t too taxing, crime dramas laced with black comedy can be good. The greatest author of irreverent crime-comedy novels was Elmore Leonard and a few of the better movies based on his books are available here. 

On Apple TV+, you can see two of the best movies made from his works, Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (to my mind, Tarantino’s best as well), with Robert Forster, Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro, and Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty, starring John Travolta, Gene Hackman, and Danny DeVito, a satire about a loan shark who makes it big in Hollywood. 

Justified and Justified: City Primeval, two series about Leonard’s very popular character, the straight-arrow US marshal Raylan Givens, can be seen on Disney+. They have good moments, but don’t really do justice to the spirit of the books. Justified is the better of the two.

Confess, Fletch – Netflix

Leonard isn’t the only game in town when it comes to the crime caper/black comedy genre. Confess, Fletch, an adaptation of the Gregory Macdonald bestselling novel directed by Greg Mottola and starring Jon Hamm, is currently streaming on Netflix. How much you enjoy this movie, about an investigative journalist who gets mixed up in a murder and an art heist, will depend on how much you are into Jon Hamm. 

Hamm is best known for playing the dark, antihero adman Don Draper on Mad Men, but since that show ended, he turned out to be more of a comic with leading-man looks and has mostly played comedy roles. He’s perfect for the goofy Fletch, who doesn’t take anything or anyone seriously, and who looks great when he’s throwing out wisecracks in police investigations – the hero becoming a suspect is de rigueur for this kind of movie. 

John Slattery, another Mad Men alumnus, plays his editor, and the movie is set mainly in Boston and Rome (Hamm was born to ride a red motor bike). Will you remember anything in the movie a minute after it ends? No, but that’s kind of the point.

Bad Monkey – Apple TV+

There are other shows similar in tone to this that are watchable with moments of better-than-watchable. One is Bad Monkey, a series with Vincent Vaughn on Apple TV+, based on a novel by Carl Hiaasen, known for his stories about crime and quips in Florida. Vaughn plays a police detective booted out of Miami for messing up a case, who tries to tell himself he likes the slower paced life in the Keys, to where he has been transferred. 

But when a certain body part is found nearby, he gets involved in solving the crime, or actually determining if there was a crime, since the widow insists her husband died in an accident. The body-part storyline is kind of gross at times, but Vaughn is very good at this kind of thing, and since Florida always looks inviting, this show may make you itch for a straw hat and a cold beer.

The Shakedown – Amazon Prime Video

Another wisecracking crime movie – this time featuring a Jewish protagonist – The Shakedown on Amazon Prime Video is set in South Africa. Justin Diamond (Carl Beukes) seems to have the perfect life. He has a thriving business selling some kind of fitness/motivational program, a wife and children, and the biggest stress in his life is about planning his daughter’s bat mitzvah – until his mistress starts blackmailing him. Conveniently, he has a black-sheep criminal brother, and soon he is in over his head. 

The Shakedown plays a little like two recent Adam Sandler movies, mixed together: You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah and Uncut Gems.

David Mamet movies – Apple TV+

Pulitzer prize-winning playwright/screenwriter/ director/essayist David Mamet will be the guest of honor at the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival, which opened on August 14, and you can see some of his most fascinating films on Apple TV+ in Israel. He is known for his witty, cynical dialogue, which some have dubbed “Mamet-speak,” as well as for his street-smart characters and inventive plots with stories that no one else is telling. 

If you don’t know his work, I’d recommend starting with House of Games, his 1987 movie that was the first he directed as well as wrote. It’s the story of a very repressed psychiatrist (Lindsay Crouse, who was his first wife) who gets involved with a group of gamblers and con men led by Joe Mantegna. In all his movies, but especially in this one, Mamet has a habit of pulling the rug out from under the audience just when they are getting comfortable, a skill few dramatists ever master.

Other movies of his that are available to stream include Things Change, which also stars Mantegna, alongside Don Ameche, as a pair of con artists, and Redbelt, a psychological thriller about an expert martial arts instructor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who learns that going into business with Hollywood types can be more dangerous than anything he has ever experienced before.