‘Fauda,’ ‘Freud,’ Litchfield ladies and ‘Mrs. Maisel’
One series I was definitely looking forward to was Freud, an Austrian show on Netflix. However, one episode in and I found it a bit disappointing.
By HANNAH BROWNA promotional image for Fauda.(photo credit: OHAD ROMANO/COURTESY OF YES)
It’s hard to compare seasons of Fauda because they are all excellent, but the third one, which finished airing recently in Israel on YES, had a particularly suspenseful arc and an interesting new character: Bashar (Ala Dakka), an aspiring boxer who gets caught between the undercover machinations of Doron (Lior Raz) and his team, and Hamas.You can still watch the show on YES VOD, but with only Hebrew subtitles. Netflix announced that it is releasing the English subtitled version in most of the world on April 16 and in France on April 4. However, Israel is not “most of the world,” and here the English version will be released only on June 25. Trust me, it’s worth waiting for.One series I was definitely looking forward to was Freud, an Austrian show on Netflix. However, one episode in and I found it a bit disappointing. We’ve had many fictional depictions of Freud (Robert Finster) as a single-minded genius, so I was ready for a new take.This series portrays him as a bit of huckster and a bumbler who stages hypnosis sessions with his housekeeper - who was rehearsed and definitely was not hypnotized - and who dabbles in the decadent nightlife of the city, where he meets a sexy and tormented psychic (Ella Rumpf). He also gets drawn into solving the grisly murder of a young woman who was sexually mutilated.This is the Babylon Berlin-style version of Freud, all dark rooms and off-kilter angles, with the seamy side of Vienna always lurking in the shadows. We don’t watch television series for history, so whether it’s accurate or not is beside the point. However, it would seem that there is enough drama inherent in the true story of Freud’s life, particularly his struggle to convince the medical establishment of the existence of the unconscious mind and its importance, that we don’t really need all these screaming psychics or bloody corpses.The series isn’t terrible, but it’s not as good as it could be. Interesting parallels came to mind this week amid all the talk of the need for hand washing, with Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian physician who was the first to realize the importance of washing hands as a way to save patients’ lives, and Freud, who had to prove the existence of the unconscious. Semmelweis couldn’t persuade the medical establishment that germs were real and deadly, and his life had a tragic ending. I imagine that somewhere, someone is now writing a miniseries about him.Now that we’re all cooped up, this might be the ideal time to visit the ladies of Litchfield Prison and binge Orange is the New Black, whether you’ve seen it before or not. It’s available on HOT VOD. The series is sometimes raunchy, often over-the-top, but it portrays a fascinating group of flawed characters who are living with the bad luck they’ve had or the bad choices they’ve made.Some of the final two seasons are so sad they can be tough going, but the brilliance of it is that, as with all good drama, your perceptions of the characters keep shifting so that certain people who seemed bizarre and scary in the beginning become completely understandable and sympathetic as the series continues. It also has wonderful black humor which may be just what many of us need right now.If you haven’t seen The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, it’s now available to those who have Cellcom TV and Partner TV as part of the Amazon Prime library. This series about a Jewish housewife on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the early 1960s who defies all conventions to become a stand-up comedian has won dozens of awards and has made a star out of its lead actress, Rachel Brosnahan.Two Netflix series coming out this week, which were not available for review at press time, are Unorthodox, the series based on the memoirs of a woman who fled her ultra-Orthodox community and which begins streaming on March 26, and the third season of Ozark, a gripping drama about a middle-class family that gets involved in money laundering, which will be available on March 27
