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Walla!'S 2020 Series Parade
Culture: Places 50-41
Walla!
Culture is proud to present for the sixth year in a row the parade of 50 series that made us the year.
Not just a year, but one in which television provided important comfort when the whole world was locked up in its home.
Even though the content was less good than in previous years, we still managed to easily find dozens of great series.
Part a'
Tags
Homeland
The stranger
Tiger King
Summary 2020
Avenue 5
Ido Yeshayahu, Ilan Kaprov and Ofir Artzi
Sunday, December 27, 2020, 12:00 p.m.
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It may be a little hard to remember through the smoke and ashes of a global plague that shocked and deceived our sense of time, but 2020 was the year that television changed fundamentally.
In November of last year came the streaming services of Disney (not in Israel) and Apple (including in Israel and with Hebrew translation), the following spring also those of Warner (HBO Max, not available in Israel) and NBC Universal (Peacock, also not available) .
All of these have joined the existing majors: Hollow, Amazon Prime Video and of course Netflix.
There are more in the pipeline, most notably the makeover that CBS All Access is doing ("The Best of the Battle", the various "Star Trek" series) before it becomes Paramount Plus in 2021.
These are waves that have not yet reached us in full force, but the coming years are going to change that fundamentally, and it is something that Israeli television companies are trying to figure out how to deal with in order to survive.
As for the year ending this week, this emergence in parallel with the epidemic that is forcing most of the world to shut itself down in its home has accelerated processes in the entertainment industry, ones that would surely have taken years if it had not.
A huge new streaming service, Quebec, has risen and fallen as part of this year.
Streaming huge movies in parallel with their cinematic premiere only adds to and blurs the buffer between the various mediums.
What is the difference between the Emmy Awards and the Oscars if all the most considered films go up directly on the streaming services?
Is film director Steve McQueen's "Small Ax" ("12 Years of Slavery"), consisting of five stand-alone films, an anthology series or a cinematic event?
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The most scorching cancellation.
"Glow" (Photo: PR)
These are fascinating questions that are changing the world of culture as we know it.
Meanwhile, despite this large addition of broadcasters who just want to create more and more content to attract subscribers, for the first time in half a decade fewer series have come to the screen - due to the Corona of course.
Productions had to be stopped, sometimes at the cost of their complete cancellation.
More complex series to produce under the rules of distance keeping and testing, or ones whose filming takes place in problem areas, simply inflated their souls.
The most stinging loss is of "GLOW".
The great wrestling drama has been canceled by Netflix even though a fourth and final season has already been ordered from it and an entire episode of it has already been filmed and the rest of the scripts have been written.
Apart from that, the plague also eliminated "The Man of Miracles" ("Messiah"), "This Is What I Miss Now" ("I Am Not Okay With This") and "New World" ("The Society") of Netflix, "Stamptown" of ABC (in Israel on yes) and "How to Become a God" by Showtime starring Kirsten Dunst (in Israel on Cellcom TV).
This temporary depletion of content has given us more welcome leisure as viewers to complete things that have been pushed to the margins for us in recent years, as well as to watch beloved series again.
Maybe it's good that way.
In a kind of alignment with such a spoiled year, we have to admit that most of what came up this year on TV was far from impressive.
Lukewarm seasons of beloved series and new and promising series that have fallen into place (a.k.a. of the soul traps of the year), and most of what was good was also maxed out. So yes, compiling a list of fifty series this year has been less competitive than in recent years, That there were quite a few good things to see after all.Do
not agree with our choices? Vote for your series of the year in our Facebook TV group,
Digging Broadcast
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In spite of everything, a confirmation of Janucci's genius.
"Avenue 5" (Photo: PR)
50. Avenue 5
Original name:
Avenue 5
Broadcast:
HBO (in Israel on HOT, yes and Cellcom TV)
Perhaps the most amazing case of the year, and certainly one of the most interesting.
The "Avenue 5" of the genius Armando Janucci, among others the creator of "Veep", began its journey as it disperses and shoots in all directions.
The satire starring Hugh Lowry ("House", "Veep") deals with the first spaceship of pleasure in space, which deviates from its orbit and everything in it goes wrong.
Throughout its first episodes there were admittedly ridiculous moments, but most of the grace that could be given to it stemmed from the power of those engaged in the craft, from the knowledge that they were capable of much more than that and would surely eventually reset themselves.
The point is that during the weeks that the corona was broadcast it broke out all over the Western world.
The population was required to shut themselves in their homes, stop associating with each other and maintain social distance.
Suddenly, the story of a collection of powerless people who are at a loss to try to manage an existential crisis and make stupid decisions one after the other has become incredibly tangible.
It has also remained so throughout the period from then until today thanks to mask opponents, vaccine opponents and plague deniers.
One of the stunning scenes in the series, which again, was created long before the Corona but aired at the height of the first closure, features a host of safe passengers and workers lying to them - even when they see others dead before their eyes!
- and insist on going out into the airlock themselves, where one by one they find their grotesque death.
If we needed confirmation of the genius of Janucci and a friend of his, it is implicitly embodied in these moments, which perhaps if not for the corona we would have thought they were too absurd.
A crazy allegory for a crazy humanity.
That's the point.
Consider that it includes a spoiler for the waist of some of the characters who were hitherto part of the cast.
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Seek to keep their plot of God.
"Central Park" (Photo: PR)
49. Central Park
Original name:
Central Park
Broadcast:
Apple TV Plus
on the waves of the musical "Hamilton", which has not been broadcast in Israel but its splashes have come so far, a musical animated comedy has aired on Apple that two of its performers - Leslie Odom Junior and David Diggs - are on the original cast The musical about the experiences of Alexander Hamilton.
The series, created by Lauren Bosard, creator of "Bob's Burgers" along with Josh Gad and Nora Smith, follows the Tilrmn who lives in Central Park in New York, and is facing an old rich and evil hates the park and plotting to contact him for a real estate project.
Most The time "Central Park" is funny and sweet, the songs in it are smart, catchy and inspiring, full of puns (Galit Axelard's excellent translation deals with them with impressive success), and as is the way of the genre - open an opening to the characters' souls. Wide and the love of man and nature, which the story she sings resonated with great intensity especially in the days of the Corona: good people seek to preserve their plot of God, the open and containing space, against forces that try to sabotage it.
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Hey, cool cats and kittens like you.
Carol Baskin, "Tiger King" (screenshot)
48. Tiger King
Original Name:
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness
Broadcast:
Netflix
The human mind has a hard time remembering a series with so many twisted and hallucinatory plot lines that connect to one deep moral theme.
It's rare in remade series, so it's even more impressive in a documentary series.
It seems that each character in Doku can develop into its own series.
what is there?
Among other things: a sex-savvy style cult, only with elephants, monkeys and all kinds of tigers you can think of;
A Cuban drug baron who claims to be the inspiration for Tony Montana's character in "Scar Face";
A woman who may have murdered her millionaire husband and fed his body to their tigers;
A polygamous marriage between three men (two of them straight);
A woman attacked by a tiger who simply rips her arm off in front of the camera (and her American choice to amputate her arm, to save money on medical expenses);
A man trying to prove his gun is not loaded and shooting himself in the head (again, while the camera is documenting everything that is happening);
Pierced tattoos in places where there are not supposed to be tattoos or piercings, a couple who coax women into orgies using lion cubs and all that even before we started talking about the series' protagonist, Joe Exotic.
Netflix's crazy docu-crime series, dubbed "Evil Beasts" in Hebrew, came at a time when the entire world was shut down by a threatening plague and could be based together on a new distraction.
And "Tiger King" delivered the goods.
She has brought into our lives memorable real-life characters like Joe (whose speech now is that he might be pardoned by Trump before he leaves the White House) and his bitter enemy Carol Baskin.
For months, they gave up the series' protagonists, spreading the word on social media and news sites, allowing the world to think of something else, and even promoting a positive outcome without necessarily meaning to - In early December, the U.S. Legislature passed a law banning the raising of large cats by private individuals.
(Living Room Fellow)
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Shooting gravity.
"Kenzo's struggle" (Photo: PR)
47. Kenzo's struggle
Original name:
Giri / Haji
Broadcast:
Netflix
"Duty / Shame", this is the meaning of "Giri / Haji", the original Japanese name of the British crime drama, and to these can be added "Atonement" - the main motif that guides the characters at the heart of this drama , Starring Kelly McDonald, Takahiro Hira and Justin Long, among others.
Not everything is exciting or original in this story, about the experiences of a Tokyo detective who was sent to London to locate his brother in order to prevent a Yakuza war in his homeland.
And yet, the series works.
Her suspenseful moments are indeed suspenseful, her exciting moments are indeed exciting, sometimes she is also very funny.
Her shortcomings seem to be compensated for by "Kenzo's Struggle" in several elements that make her a beautiful and special work.
The meeting of cultures alone injects a lot of freshness, there is something fascinating at the edges that meet - the Japanese yakuza, the Jewish Yom Kippur, the gay parties in London, even urban Japan versus rural Japan.
And what mostly elevates the series is its piyyut.
Above all, there is a lyrical seriousness that gives the story a kind of mythological tale, and culminates in the last episode with such a bold scene that not everyone will necessarily connect to it, but whoever will find in it a beautiful and very moving record of extraordinary creation.
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Holds so many bullets in the air.
"Warrior Nun" (Photo: PR)
46. A warrior nun
Original Name:
Warrior Nun
Broadcast:
Netflix
It's easy to draw a line between "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and many of the series that have come in the 23 years since it aired, but few have taken as much inspiration from it as "Warrior Nun," Netflix's new fantasy series.
It tells the story of Eva (Alba Batista), an orphaned young woman who wakes up in a morgue and discovers that she has superpowers thanks to an aura inserted into her body.
The foreign factor in her body makes her a "team," and now she is asked to be part of a shadow organization of demon-hunting (and killing!) Nuns headed by a priest, even though she does not want that role at all.
If at first "Warrior Nun" raises the fear that this will be another series about ancient orders, secret writings and demons made of lava, she clarifies that the main thing in it is the relationship between the characters.
There are quite a few of them, and not all of them get a proper in-depth look at the ten episodes of the first season.
In fact, the series holds so many balls in the air that it leaves us with a sense that it has plenty of directions to go, both in terms of the mythological and the earthly side.
What is gratifying is that this feeling is not frustrating but promising, because the season gets better as it progresses, and even scratching the surface yields beautiful moments and non-obvious connections between the characters.
The series marks Eva as the bearer of the aura because her big heart makes her a natural leader.
Just like her, a "warrior nun" is cute, captivating and heartwarming.
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Provides the delicate side.
Tomer Kapon, "The Boys" (Photo: PR)
45. The boys
Original name:
The Boys
Broadcast:
Amazon Prime Video
Like in its first season, this time too the "boys" juggle with lots of balls in the air - a variety of characters, each of which brings a different angle.
But if in the first season this multiplication did not impair the whole, it is a little less true in this case.
The scattering in it is noticeable.
Some of the plot lines are just puzzling (especially of the depths).
Others lead to districts that can be seen coming from afar.
Attempts to shake with blood and violence and exploding bodies are no longer as effective, although the "boys" certainly try.
Lots.
In addition, more than in the past it is evident that not all the characters are sufficiently developed, and the series' critique of racism in America is done without any sophistication or subtext.
And even so, even in the second season "The Boys" is one of the most delightful, clever and surprising series on television.
The game is still great, the effects are amazing this time too and the creativity in the horror scenes is astonishing.
And despite the stumbling blocks in the script, it is still laden with flashes.
On the one hand, the "boys" shoot a variety of sharpened arrows at the superhero culture and even the Church of Scientology.
On the other hand, it has a heart that prevents it from becoming an engineered and cynical product.
Tomer Capone in particular continues to prove that he is much more than his familiar stanza.
The connection between Franchi in his portrayal and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) perhaps provides the delicate side of the series that is anything but that.
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In her good moments she knew how to do well what she was doing.
"Homeland" (Photo: PR)
44. Homeland
Original Name:
Homeland
Broadcast:
Showtime (in Israel at yes)
Alex Ganza, the showrunner of "Homeland", deserves an award celebrating the best patience of the last decade in the industry.
He still has to deal with a broadcast network that clings with all its might to his series and refuses to release, a writing room that has had to concoct seasons out of nowhere even though all the good ideas have been exhausted, a main star (Claire Daines) has this job out of all holes, and viewers enjoy announcing every year In the year the series is once again lost in its own maze of twists.
And despite everything, Genza managed to bring the eighth season to a pretty interesting starting point where Carrie is in Brody's original shoes, and is also suspected of betraying her homeland after being captured.
That, plus a fitting and endearing ending that half corresponds with reality, and a few more mid-episodes that were suspenseful, is enough to declare the final season of "Homeland" effective, and preserve its legacy as a spy series that in its good moments knew how to do well what it does.
It may be the background music that has lifted the heaviest burden in creating the atmosphere of suspense (it's certainly not Daines' game or geopolitical credibility), and the TV landscape will not exactly miss it, but "Homeland" will always be our little series we sold to Great America.
Provincial, but true.
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Everything in it worked effectively.
"The Stranger" (Photo: PR)
43. The Stranger
Original name:
Outsider
Broadcast:
HBO (in Israel on HOT, yes and Cellcom TV) Quite a
few episodes and TV series have been built on the tension between the fantastic and the rational, not to mention cultural phenomena such as "Bags in the Dark" and "Lost", so "The Stranger" Did not exactly pave its own roads.
She did take this gap very seriously, making sure to establish some kind of authenticity even though it was seemingly impossible, and not letting her protagonists completely drift after the fantasy.
A human being cannot be in two different places at the same time, but Detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelssohn) has systematically rejected the supernatural explanation that most of us as TV viewers rush to run through our minds, and had to go through an entire psychological process before even considering a delusional potential theory. shape.
And in the end there was no other "scientific" explanation or rational sucking evasion - "The Stranger" did not follow any fine line between Mulder and Scully but completely devoted herself to her Stephen King character, who presented us with a branching and fascinating supernatural mechanism revealed in a clever and original tap. .
Everything in it simply worked very effectively, especially the necessary directing in the coolness of Jason Bateman and the captivating character of Holly Gibney (the wonderful Cynthia Aribo), who was the emotional center of the plot and managed to unite around believers and skeptics alike into a cohesive bunch working together to stop something That she did not quite understand, and it was fun to see it.
The "stranger" took an absurd concept and handled it with impressive professionalism.
It is worth taking an example from her.
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Shatnz entertains between a youth series and adventure books.
"Beaches of Secrets" (Photo: PR)
42. Beaches of Secrets
Original name:
Outer Banks
Broadcast:
Netflix
The youth drama owes quite a bit to the series that preceded it in the genre.
Of her spiritual parents, she is particularly fond of the "OC".
It features a boy from a broken home, class warfare (the scenes of the affluent side a-la "Revenge" are the least successful thing in the series), rich in pastel polo shirts, love on both sides of the barricade, and even the same plot move that comes at some point.
The main, and quite significant, difference between the two series is the humor.
The "OC" influenced him.
The new series - not really.
The lack of comic nuances is compensated for by "Beaches of Secrets" in what makes it fresh after all, and very addictive: a treasure hunt plot that throws its protagonists into a dangerous mission, turning the entire series into an entertaining chatterbox between a full-fledged genre series and adventure books.
The same tendency to clichés in adolescence stories is also applied by the series to the action, including ornate villains, silly moves (in the first encounter between the bad and the good, for no apparent reason, they shoot at them while they escape) and quite predictable twists.
Somehow this mix works.
Quite a bit because "Outer Banks" just slices on everything a doc of longing.
Sometimes it seems like most of the events happen during a golden sunset, Netflix's budget allows it to show off an appealing abundance, the photography is beautiful in a way you don't usually see in youth series, and this whole series looks like a pleasant vacation we were once on and now fun to remember.
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His Star Power does the job.
Chris Evans (Photo: PR)
41. Defend Jacob
Original Name:
Defending Jacob
Broadcast:
Apple TV Plus It's
hard to say that Apple's crime thriller is unusual or particularly impressive.
It has quite a few unnecessary smears that make it clear that this story could have been told in fewer chapters.
So what's the downside of "Protecting Jacob" in the eyes of so many Apple users, who have made it their most successful series to date in real time?
In a bustling TV climate where movie stars have long been no guarantee of a successful or talked-about series, it seems that Chris Evans' star power in the lead role is still doing the job.
The game in it is solid in general, including among the young players.
The delicate and beautiful soundtrack contributes to restraint and gloom.
Morten Tildom, the Norwegian director nominated for an Oscar for "The Imitation Game", directed all the episodes of the series and gives it a beautiful aesthetic, which is evident from the spectacular opening.
But probably the greatest virtue of "protecting Jacob" lies precisely in what is trite in it, in that it details the recognizable and popular strings.
You know, the killer-water plot, a court drama, family secrets, a small town where everyone knows everyone - elements most of which all appeared later in another hit series and less good, "You Should Have Known".
Despite the dead moments of "Protecting Jacob", the story she tells is ballooning and effective, and that is the essence of her virtue.
Probably not for nothing that its great success is happening in parallel with the corona plague, when people are required to shut themselves in their homes and seek familiar comfort from the screen in front of them.
"Protecting Jacob" provides just that.
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