Brewing Trouble, a new Yes series that became available on Yes VOD and Yes Binge on March 12, is just the kind of comedy, with heart, that a lot of people are craving right now.
It stars Sasson Gabay and Ido Katzir as a grandfather and grandson who are both going through tough times for different reasons and end up helping each other out. Katzir, who was in Berlin Blues, plays Yuval Nahshoni, a 30-year-old who grew up in the desert town of Arad, but left after his father’s death, and moved to Tel Aviv to open a bar.
Since his bar went out of business, he has been working as a food deliveryman and hopes to save money to open a new bar one day. His grandfather, Shmulik (Gabay, a four-time Ophir Award winner), is a stubborn old guy who is angry that his wife died of COVID and hates the assisted living facility in Beersheba where he lives.
When he runs away from the facility and locks himself in his old house, which is on the market, and brandishes a gun, he terrifies a real estate agent and a couple looking to buy it. Yuval has to make the trip to Arad to deal with the crisis, and Shmulik injures himself after he fires the gun, so Yuval is stuck there until he recovers.
The series, which was created by Omri Amit and Adar Mirom, follows the grandfather and grandson’s misadventures as Shmulik refuses to sell the house, and then gets them deeply in debt to a local Bedouin criminal gang, in an especially funny sequence. Yuval’s dream to open a new bar seems further away than ever, until it turns out that the one thing Shmulik is still good at besides getting into trouble is making arak.
He uses a secret recipe, and it turns out that it’s the strongest and best arak that anyone has ever tasted. It’s especially well-suited to be sold as expensive chasers in trendy Tel Aviv pubs, where people pay big money for anything home-made, organic, and, as Yuval points out to one of the Bedouin thugs (Shadi Mar’i of Fauda, Bethlehem, and Eid), which has an entertaining origin story behind it. The irony of the stubborn elderly man who is totally set in his ways, making money selling liquor to young Instagram-obsessed urbanites, is nice, and captures a side of Israeli life today.
When people say that there is chemistry between actors, they are usually referring to romantic chemistry, but there’s a great rapport between Gabay, one of Israel’s most beloved stars, and newcomer Katzir, both of whom are mourning the loss of Yuval’s father. This elevates the show from jokey farce to something more touching, which will keep you hooked.
Watching the best from the Oscars
With everything else going on in the world, you may have forgotten that the Oscars were on March 15. An edited version of the ceremony was shown on the same channel on March 17 at 9:30 p.m., with Hebrew subtitles.
Yes, Cinematheque is offering some Oscar-winning movies to celebrate the ceremony. These include James L. Brooks’s As Good As It Gets, a quirky dramedy whose stars, Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt, both won Oscars, which can also be seen on Netflix; Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, the serial-killer classic which spawned dozens of bad imitations, but which is still creepy and suspenseful, and whose leads, Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, also both won Oscars; Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich, which showcased Julia Roberts at her best; and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, for which Robert De Niro won the Best Actor Award for portraying boxer Jake La Motta, a role for which he gained 50 pounds, the kind of transformation the Oscars love to reward.
If you’d like to watch some of this year’s Oscar front-runners before the ceremony, the two biggest contenders, One Battle After Another and Sinners, are available on HBO Max and Apple TV+. Two other Best Picture nominees are available on Netflix: Train Dreams and Frankenstein. Bugonia, another Best Picture nominee, is also available to stream on Apple TV+. The documentary that is expected to win the Oscar, The Perfect Neighbor, about a neighborhood dispute that turned deadly, can be seen on Netflix.
My latest dive into the HBO Max vault led me to Silicon Valley, a sharp satire of the tech industry that I enjoyed very much when it premiered in 2014. The six-season comedy series, which was clearly written in consultation with Silicon Valley insiders, chronicles the ups and downs of a company called Pied Piper, which has the greatest compression algorithm ever, through which users can access, upload, or download all the music, video, etc. in the world with no loss of quality.
The algorithm is the brainchild of Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch), a brilliant but socially inept programmer, who lives in Silicon Valley in a tech incubator run by the crude Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller). By day, he works at Hooli, a thinly disguised version of Microsoft, which is headed by Gavin Belson (Matt Ross), the main villain in the story, an arrogant narcissist who spends his time buying up and destroying innovative tech companies and crushing young inventors, while boasting constantly about trying to make the world a better place. Richard’s comrades in Pied Piper are Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), a competitive and nervous Pakistani immigrant, and Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), an equally competitive illegal Canadian alien who is a satanist.
The series ended in 2019, and because I hadn’t seen it since its conclusion, I hesitated to revisit it, because social satire, particularly about a field as well-known as technology, tends to date very fast. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is funnier than ever, and (spoiler alert), in the later seasons, AI becomes a major factor.
Even more important than its relevance to current tech issues is the fact that it’s as funny as ever, so much so that I binged it. More than many other shows I’ve tried recently, it has taken my mind off everything that’s going on outside the Valley.