Returning series, new ones and classic movies coming up during Passover

From HBO to Netflix, YES and CellcomTV, there is plenty to watch this Passover.

By HANNAH BROWN
‘MONEY HEIST’ (photo credit: TAMARA ARRANZ RAMOS/NETFLIX)
‘MONEY HEIST’
(photo credit: TAMARA ARRANZ RAMOS/NETFLIX)
It’s Passover, time to go for hikes and vacations abroad, only... what we’ll all be doing is watching TV. Fortunately, there are a few intriguing new series and movies coming our way.
Run, a new series from HBO, is coming to HOT (HOT HBO and VOD, Next TV), YES (YES Edge and Sting TV) and CellcomTV on April 13. It’s a suspense drama/black comedy about two college sweethearts who have been apart for years and suddenly decide to flee together and leave their lives behind. It has a great cast, with Merritt Wever (Unbelievable, Marriage Story) and Domhnall Gleeson (the last few Star Wars movies, Ex Machina, Brooklyn), as well as Archie Panjabi, who played Kalinda on The Good Wife. It was created by Vicky Jones and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (who has a small part), the team who collaborated on Fleabag and Killing Eve. Coincidentally, the third season of the very dark and often darkly funny series Killing Eve is returning to YES London on April 7 and HOT HBO on April 29.
‘RUN’ (Ken Woroner/HBO, courtesy of YES)
‘RUN’ (Ken Woroner/HBO, courtesy of YES)
Another returning series, the comedy Insecure, will start running its fourth season on HOT, YES and Cellcom TV on April 13. The lead actress and series creator, Issa Rae, is charming enough so that you can enjoy it even if you haven’t watched the previous seasons.
This can’t be said of the Netflix series Ozark, which just released its third season. It has some thematic and stylistic similarities to Breaking Bad, in that it’s about a middle-class Chicago  financial advisor (Jason Bateman) who gets involved with money laundering for a drug cartel. In order to stay alive after one of his associates skims money, he has to move with his family to the Ozarks and continue the laundering on a much larger scale. It’s easy to identify with the characters, although sometimes hard to like them, just as it was with Breaking Bad. The show dipped in quality in season two, spending a lot of time on a few not-so-memorable characters, but season three is a definite return to form.
The Netflix series Money Heist returns for its fourth season, with all episodes becoming available on April 3. The first two seasons of this Spanish show, about a group of misfits who stage an elaborate heist and take hostages in a bank, were gripping, addictively so.
In the third season, though, the plot revolved around a new scheme to rob the Bank of Spain that seemed more like a desire on the part of the show’s creators to keep the series going than a story that needed to be told. Some romantic drama among the characters made the show more ordinary than it had been in its earlier seasons.
The fourth season had not been released at press time, but judging from the trailer, it seems to pick up exactly where the third season left off. Watching it, I realized that, in spite of the third season’s flaws, I missed the appealing characters very much and was glad to see that the Machiavellian anti-hero, Berlin (Pedro Alonso), one of the fan favorites, is back, if only in flashbacks.
Your kids probably know all the Disney and Pixar movies they want to see, but you can introduce them to the classic Steven Spielberg film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which is available on HOT Cinema Kids. Although it’s been endlessly imitated since it came out in 1983, it has aged well and it’s a movie that everyone can watch together.
Another fun movie, although not one for kids, coming up during Passover is Romancing the Stone (1984), which will be shown on YES 3 on April 12 at 10 p.m. It’s a sometimes silly but enjoyable story of a very withdrawn romance novelist (Kathleen Turner) whose sister is kidnapped in Latin America, and who must join forces with a rakish mercenary (Michael Douglas) to save her. It also features Danny DeVito and has a catchy theme song by Eddy Grant. Even though we’ll be stuck at home, it will be fun to see Turner and Douglas running through the jungle in this funny, sexy and tongue-in-cheek adventure story.


Related Tags
netflix