One game that can keep you busy is trying to guess which Israeli television show will be the next one to get a deal to be remade abroad. This week offers two promising candidates: a new show on KAN 11 called Six Zeros and the second season on Keshet of Line in the Sand.
Six Zeros, which starts running on Channel 11 on June 13 at 9:15 p.m. (and episodes will be available on kan.org.il), is a clever title because it has two meanings: It’s the number of zeros in sums in the millions, and “zero” is slang for an unimpressive person. Six Zeros is a drama series about six people who have won the lottery and are required to take a workshop to prepare them for the change in their lives before they receive any money. It’s obviously a fact-based story, and it’s fun to watch it all play out, because how people handle money is a subject that is generally as revealing as it is full of conflict.
Ayelet (Roni Dalumi), who runs the workshop, tells them on the first day that a huge percentage of lottery winners spend all their money within three to five years. But all of the winners in her group are sure they aren’t going to do that. There are two couples taking part. One is an elderly couple on a kibbutz (Shlomo Bar-Aba of the movie Footnote and the series Zehu Ze! and Liora Rivlin from the series Stockholm). The wife has decided they must give all the money to their daughters, while the husband would like to keep some, and their disagreement over this leads the husband to reveal a deep secret.
The younger couple, Ruti (Shani Klein, who is best known for a scene-stealing performance in Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation) and Amir (Ofer Hayoun of Valley of Tears and Manayek) are an engaged couple struggling to make ends meet. Even after they get the news of their windfall, they argue about how much to spend for their wedding and how much money they should give to her family.
Adam (Elisha Banai of The Malevolent Bride and Image of Victory) is a café owner whose girlfriend is more serious than he is about making a commitment. The final winner, Alex (Rotem Keinan, who is in the upcoming movie Golda) is an accountant who is shy and withdrawn, so much so that his job is in jeopardy in spite of his skill with numbers.
In a series like this, some storylines and characters will grab you much more than others, and I most enjoyed Shani Klein, an actress who is always very appealing, as the bride-to-be torn between her family and her fiancé. But although this series is set in Israel, the dilemmas and the drama is universal, and I can see a show about how lottery winners handle their newfound wealth traveling especially well. The series was created by Noya Oren and directed by Nir Bergman (Here We Are).
What is the Israeli cop show Line in the Sand?
A GRITTY police drama loosely based on a real case of organized crime and corruption in Nahariya in the early 2000s, Line in the Sand would also appeal to audiences abroad.
Its second season begins running on Channel 12 on June 13 after the news, with episodes available on the Keshet website (mako.co.il) afterward. It was created by Rotem Shamir and Yuval Yefet, the duo behind the Netflix series Rough Diamonds, about ultra-Orthodox diamond dealers in Belgium, who have also written for Fauda. Its first season came out in 2021, and while I remembered enjoying it a great deal at the time, I really needed the refresher at the beginning of season two. What follows contains some spoilers for those who haven’t seen the first season.
Alon (Tsahi Halevi) grew up in Nahariya, is the son of a cop (Uri Gavriel), and joined the force himself, eventually making a name for himself as a police detective in Tel Aviv. But at the beginning of the first season, he was transferred back to his hometown. His wife, Miki (Shani Cohen), a high-powered lawyer, and his teenage daughter, Tom (Aviv Buchler), aren’t too happy at first about leaving the big city, but they are supportive.
Once he arrives in Nahariya and starts looking into the organized crime gang run by the baby-faced Maor Ezra (Shlomo Ifrah), he learns that the mayor and some high-level police are helping the gang operate and taking money from them.
Refusing to look the other way, he and three of his police colleagues, Kobi (Maor Schwitzer), Reuven (Danny Steg) and Yoav (Daniel Gad), fight the gangsters with all their might, but find that they are not being backed up by the police brass. They take matters into their own hands, building their own explosives to warn off the gangsters, and at the end of the first season, they are caught and jailed.
Season two picks up the next year. Thanks to Miki’s efforts, Alon’s and the others’ prison sentences are cut short, and they are released, optimistic that they can rejoin the force, but it’s not so easy. Alon contemplates moving the family out of Nahariya, while Miki urges him to stay and fight. She takes a job as campaign manager to a reform mayoral candidate, while Reuven gets a job in a butcher’s shop and finds romance with a Russian single mother. But they are still targets for Ezra’s gang, even though Ezra has also landed in prison.
Season two, to judge from the first two episodes released to the press, is widening its focus to include even more about Arab gangs from neighboring villages – a subject that has been in the news a great deal lately – as well as looking across the border, at South Lebanon Army members who have been relocated to Israel who also get involved.
At its best moments, it is reminiscent of The Wire and The Sopranos, and each episode ends on a cliffhanger. It keeps the thrills coming, even if some of the storylines are less compelling than others. Halevi is as good as he’s been in anything since the movie Bethlehem and is very believable as a cop who is honest but can’t think as far ahead as the gangsters do.
TWO SERIES that bring back old favorites are coming up. If you loved the movie The Full Monty, about unemployed steelworkers who become strippers in a town in northern England in 1997, you’ll want to see the new TV series of the same name, which starts running on Disney+, which is available in Israel either on its own or through Yes, on June 14.
The original tagline was “This year’s most revealing comedy,” and the new one is “Older. None the wiser.” Much of the original cast is back, including Robert Carlyle and Tom Wilkinson, but there are many new, more diverse characters.
Another reboot, And Just Like That..., the series that features the Sex and the City characters in the present day, premiered its first season in 2021, and the new season will run on Hot starting on June 22.
The big news is that Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon will be joined by Kim Cattrall, who sat out the first season, and will appear at least in a cameo, and that John Corbett will also be making an appearance, playing Aiden, the fiancé Carrie jilted. This series also included a more diverse cast than the original, although audiences were sharply divided about how well this gambit worked.