It’s been over three years since the first season of Shababnikim, the series that has been described as Entourage with black hats, graced our screens. I didn’t realize how much I had missed these guys until I saw the four episodes of the second season that were released to the press.
The series is available on Hot VOD and Next TV and is running Sundays and Mondays at 9:15 p.m. on Hot 3.
The good news is that this season is at least as funny as the first, maybe even funnier. But better than that, it’s as if everyone involved took these years to think up a way to add more depth to the story and the characters. That fact that there are more touching moments doesn’t make the laughs any less enjoyable when they come and they do, frequently.
The series focuses on three young haredi guys in Jerusalem — Avinoam (Daniel Gad), the son of an Arye Deri-like politician; Meir, (Israel Atias), a Mizrahi guy from a modest family; and Dov (Omer Pereleman Striks), whose wealthy Ashkenazi family lives abroad — who are rebellious but not to the point of openly breaking laws or leaving the community. They want to become “modern haredim” and are trying to figure out what that means. At the beginning of the first season, they team up with Gedalia (Ori Laizerouvich), a brilliant and very pious scholar who is abrasive and lacks social skills, much like a haredi Sheldon Cooper, the hero of The Big Bang Theory.
Just as the first season opened with a shocking accident that kills a minor character, so does this season, as if to give the message: You need to have a lot of faith to believe in God in a world like this.
Towards the end of the previous season, the guys were kicked out of yeshiva and this season they are at a crossroads. Gedalia wants back in to the yeshiva world, while the others try their hand at entrepreneurship, which goes south very quickly. Then, in a nod to the Knesset satire show, Sweetie’s Party, they show up at the office of Avinoam’s father, offering their services as advisors. “How hard could it be?” asks Avinoam, and he’s right of course, except that he ignores the fact that the hard part is getting someone to give you the job with all the money and perks.
Next stop: high tech. They try their luck with a training program for haredim and they have a few Startup Nation fantasies, thinking about inventions that the “Jewish mind” has come up with, such as the Iron Dome and Bamba. It turns out that actually getting paid to do anything in high tech is not as easy as they had hoped. Living in a luxury apartment (it’s so luxurious, it actually has a pool) on a mostly secular street owned by Dov’s family, they noticed a “secular yeshiva” across the street, with lots of attractive guys and girls doing yoga on the balcony. Watching these students makes them sigh about how easy secular life is, and it does look simple, compared to theirs, where even the wrong color tie can ruin their chances with a girl on a date.
Learning how easy it is to set up a new yeshiva, they create one of their own and they know exactly who they want to bring in to head it — Gedalia. Gedalia is trying to get rabbinic ordination and pining for Devora (Maya Wertheimer, whom you know as the pitch woman doing that weird dance from the Yad Shtaim commercials, if you watch any Israeli TV).
That’s the main setup — how they open and run a yeshiva — mixed with their interactions with the secular students across the street (Avinoam joins their yoga class at one point) and their attempts to get engaged. Guri Alfi returns as the slick, incredibly arrogant matchmaker Shlomi Zacks, whose only way of interacting is to tell everyone else what they are doing wrong.
The actors are all good and it’s the kind of ensemble comedy where timing is everything and they work wonderfully together. Ori Laizerouvich has the showiest role as the socially awkward near-genius and Guri Alfi, who recently hosted the documentary series, The New Jew, shows his flair for playing a character you want to hate, but who is right enough of the time so that you can never dismiss him. In one scene, he delivers a speech to the secular students about the virtues of the haredi way of love and marriage, and even if you disagree with him, it’s an extraordinary piece of writing and he delivers it beautifully. This scene will be discussed and debated long after this season is over.
The series was created by Eliran Malka (who directed the movie about the founding of Shas, The Unorthodox) and Daniel Paran, one of the pioneers of Israeli television, who died in 2018, and the first episode is dedicated to his memory. In a note to the press, Malka said that due to the delays of the pandemic, he was able to write additional new episodes that go even deeper into the issues that the series raises.
Very much as it was with the original Entourage, about four friends from Queens transplanted to Hollywood, you start watching for the shtick and the jokes and end up sticking with it because you come to care about the characters. It may sound odd that a show about people for whom sensitivity is not high on their list of values (to put it mildly) can touch you deeply, but Shababnikim does.