Moments of light and grace: 'Bad Boy' comes to the screen

Hagar Ben-Asher, the director and co-creator of the new Hot series Bad Boy, a tough drama about a juvenile prison, which was just sold to Netflix International, said of the characters in the series, “There’s always a horrible backstory. People don’t end up in prison for no reason. The challenge is to find a way to dramatize their stories so people will care about them.”

Bad Boy tells the story of Dean (Guy Manster), a young teen with an unstable, addict mother. Dean gets involved in crime and enters the juvenile detention system, where he is exposed to horrific cruelty as well as kind people truly trying to help him break the cycle of criminality and violence.

Each episode is framed by the stand-up comedy of Daniel Chen, who plays himself and is actually Dean as an adult. Chen tells the story of his adolescent years behind bars through black humor.

Despite its tough themes, Bad Boy is so well written and well acted that it draws you in immediately, and you are caught up in Dean’s story and root for him. It has received rave reviews since its debut in Israel last week, drawing comparisons to the grittiest and greatest crime drama series of all time, The Wire.

Ben-Asher was a natural to direct and write the series, since she has often dealt with dark themes in her movies, starting with The Slut, the story of a free-spirited mother whose negligence makes her daughters vulnerable to sexual abuse.

She is one of a handful of Israeli filmmakers who manages to make movies and television series both abroad and in Israel, and she is best known for the American feature film Dead Women Walking, about a group of female death-row inmates.

BAD BOY, from Tedy Productions and SIPUR, was co-created by Ron Leshem, the Israeli author and screenwriter who made both the Israeli and HBO productions of Euphoria, and while that series was not set in a correctional facility, it gives an extremely disturbing look at the lives of teenagers.

Leshem, who was a journalist before going into entertainment, had met Chen many years ago when he was working on an article about the juvenile justice system and was fascinated by his story, especially after he learned of Chen’s later stand-up career.

When Leshem was thinking about using Chen’s life as the basis for a series, he told Ben-Asher about him. “I went to see his stand-up, and I thought that he’s very funny and his life story is very interesting and inspiring,” said Ben-Asher.

Although in the stand-up scenes in the series, Chen mines his teen years for black humor, he actually didn’t do stand-up about this aspect of his life previously, but was encouraged by the Bad Boy creators to add this material to his act. “The stand-up that’s in the series was written by him especially for the show. It was the first time he got up onstage and talked about prison.”

But while the stand-up provides laughs, it has a more central role in the series, said Ben-Asher. “The stand-up is like a Greek chorus. It supports the story and gives it a comic dimension… We knew that the drama had to be balanced with humor and comedy, because that’s what stand-up is about, it’s about how a person uses humor to survive difficult events in life, and we knew the series had to do that, too.

“And it needed to show that the boy who went through these difficult things became this person who uses humor to cope with it all, that it’s possible to find something funny in everything.”

Working on the series made Ben-Asher think hard about this complex juvenile system.

“It’s very hard to rehabilitate people. The detention system for rehabilitating youth, the people are very young, and there’s the hope that maybe it’s possible to rehabilitate them, by putting them in a different environment where they won’t be criminals… There are people in the system who are actually children, 12 years old, and they try to give support and the option of changing things, fixing things, but it’s not easy.”

THE ACTORS have received extremely positive reviews. “It was a very special experience. Most of the actors were never on a set before. You can call them non-actors,” Ben-Asher said. “It was fun. I was somewhere between a preschool teacher and a mother to many of the actors.”

While it wasn’t always easy to work with the inexperienced young cast, Ben-Asher felt that these actors added a certain intensity.

“There’s something very enjoyable about working with actors who are so young, there’s something wild about it, and in my opinion, the result is wonderful. It’s not like an older actor who you can talk to about how he should say his lines and where he should stand. These young actors can change what they do from take to take, from moment to moment.”

Manster, in the lead, has come in for special praise for his utterly natural performance, which is so believable it would be easy to think he was actually a delinquent playing himself. Ben-Asher told me that wasn’t the case.

“Guy Manster was on a children’s television show before, so he knew what a set was, and his parents are very supportive of him and his acting. Guy is a natural… With great intuition and even from the first audition, he read the text and he understood what he needed to do, without my needing to say much. As the series went on, he got even better. It was a casting miracle.”

Although it wasn’t easy to get such a dark series made, the creators were gratified at the enthusiastic response it received in its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, not long before the war started.

Following October 7, the series was put on the back burner, and Ben-Asher is pleased that it is now being released in Israel and will soon become available on Netflix. The Netflix deal is a particularly important honor this year, when anti-Israel feeling is running high and people around the world are calling for a boycott of Israeli creators.

Translating comedy 

“I’m interested in how the humor will translate. We’ll wait and see. We’re working on the translation now. It’s hard to translate comedy. It’s hard to think of the right words that will keep it funny. But its reception in Toronto exceeded our expectations, so that’s encouraging.”

Despite the challenge of translating the humor, Ben-Asher is convinced that the heart of the series will appeal to audiences in all the 190 countries around the world where Netflix streams content.

“A juvenile prison is a very cruel place. Adolescent boys are very tough and to put them all in a cell two meters by two meters is very challenging. What most interested me was the gap between their toughness and their kindness,” Ben-Asher said.

“I was interested in the seam between how horrible this framework is and the capacity for healing, to give love and support, and to give rehabilitative options, these moments of light and grace. That’s what interests me, not just to say it’s a terrible, dark place and you’re doomed from the moment you get there.”