Alyssa Rosenberg, a culture blogger at Think Progress, notes that Israeli television is becoming quite a source for American popular culture:
The Hollywood Reporter notes that New Regency’s just signed a deal that lets it have first crack at content coming out of one of Israel’s biggest production companies. Israeli shows are never going to translate directly the way British ones do—you can’t just slap a Hebrew-language show on PBS or Hulu and expect that it’ll find a well-established audience like the one that’s willing to give almost any BBC content a shot. But Israeli shows have been the basis for programs like In Treatment, part of the second wave of well-regarded HBO shows, Homeland, which is helping Showtime steal a match on HBO, and Who’s Still Standing?, an NBC quiz show that’s helping the struggling network fill hours.
Of course, this type of thing also goes the other way: when we were living in Israel several years ago, my wife and I became a little bit obsessed with a show called HaShagrir, which literally means “The Ambassador”. The show was based on The Apprentice, but in true Israeli style, the winner, rather than getting a job with Donald Trump, was sent to America as a goodwill ambassador for a year. For America, the obsession is money and jobs, so that’s what the big winner gets, in Israel, the obsession is what other people think of Israel, so the big winner gets to go to New York and set up concerts for Israeli bands. (Back in New York, Liba and I attended a concert thrown by the organization employing The Ambassador, and when we saw him, we had that peculiar feeling like we knew him so well, even though, of course, we didn’t. Reality TV isn’t any more real in Israel than it is here.)
Rosenberg has another point: unlike British television, Israeli shows are not simply rebroadcast here. The ideas, characters, and settings are Americanized, so what we end up watching is not so much Israeli pop culture as the American reimagining of Israeli ideas. Not that there is anything wrong with that (I’ve heard great things about Homeland) but I think Rosenberg’s point here is great:
In a sense, I regret that we’re really only going to be able to remake Israeli shows rather than rebroadcasting them directly. Our national conversation about Israel is bigger than this, but it might be healthy to keep the setting so audiences here can see the country the same way we see England: as an ally, a place of both great natural beauty and sometimes-prosaic urban design, where some people are involved in existential struggles against security threats and others are consumed with the prosaic business of everyday life and everyday jobs.
That seems absolutely right to me. And here is my first suggestion for a direct rebroadcast: Srugim, a show about young religious Jewish Israelis trying to work out how to live within the strictures of Jewish law and still live a fully modern life . I have not been able to watch the show, but I’ve heard good things about it, and this sort of everyday struggle with life, love, Jewish law, and the sometimes difficult situation in Israel is exactly the sort of thing Rosenberg is talking about. C’mon NBC, bring it to America! What do you have to lose? Hardly anybody watches your network anyway!

