Given the news of the murders of six Israeli hostages by Hamas earlier this week, the series Hostages, shown every night this week on KAN 11 after the news, can help you put this tragedy into context. The episodes can be seen at the Kan website kan.org.il.
While the current crisis is the largest hostage-taking in Israeli history, Israel has faced many other incidents in which both civilians and soldiers were taken prisoner, and these are analyzed in detail by survivors, historians, and family members. The six-episode series is by Duki Dror and Itai Landsberg, who have made many excellent documentaries and series, both as collaborators and separately.
These include one of the early films about the Nova massacre, Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre, as well as the fascinating Cassandra’s Prophecy, about how the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the Mossad teamed up to try to stop Hezbollah’s involvement in international cocaine trafficking.
Hostages starts in the 1970s and chronicles how Israeli policy toward hostage-taking has changed over time. Decades ago, rescue missions were considered the only option. But then the era of hostage-taking on foreign soil began, notably in a series of hijackings, and the government began to engage in negotiations, which were generally conducted secretly.
The series details how Dina, the former queen of Jordan, was involved in some incidents involving Ahmed Jibril’s terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There is also an episode devoted to the search for missing airman Ron Arad, whose body has never been recovered in the nearly 40 years since he was taken hostage.
The final episode is about the Israelis – living and dead – who are still held by Hamas, and the struggles of their families to keep their names and faces in the minds of the politicians and the public.
FOR SOME, this isn’t the right time to watch Hostages. Instead, they might consider two beloved series that have just released the early episodes of their fourth seasons, Slow Horses on Apple TV+ and Only Murders in the Building on Disney+.
Slow Horses is a suspenseful British spy series about a group of MI5 screwups led by an abrasive but brilliant (and brilliantly funny) commander (Gary Oldman), and it plays like a John le Carre film, with laughs.
Only Murders in the Building is a very New York-oriented series I’ve described in the past as Seinfeld with murder. It details how a group of reclusive misfits, a down-on-luck theater director (Martin Short), a faded cop-show star (Steve Martin), and an unemployed artist (Selena Gomez) team up to create a podcast about the murder of one of their neighbors. Like Slow Horses, the cast here gets more comfortable with every season, and the stories play better.
In the fourth season, the main characters are whisked to Hollywood by a movie studio that wants to make a film about their podcast. The three are joined in much of the action by their movie-star doppelgangers, Zach Galifianakis, Eugene Levy, and Eva Longoria, who shadow them for research, as they try to solve yet another murder. If you saw season three, you’ll know who it is, and they return from California to comb their gloomy Upper West Side residence, modeled on several real-life buildings, among them the Ansonia and the Apthorp, for clues.
Other guest stars include Meryl Streep playing an unsung actress who has just gotten her first (sort of) big break; several other stars make appearances in upcoming episodes. The writers have a knack for creating characters with the eccentricity of real-life New Yorkers and there is a major plot twist that involves a very Big Apple-type of scam.
This season also satirizes Hollywood, including a dour twin sister director team known as the Brothers Sisters.
Moving on
JANE FONDA and Lily Tomlin were so great together on the series Grace and Frankie that it makes sense that they worked together again in the dark dramedy, Moving On (2022), which has just become available on Netflix.
It’s a revenge story, similar in tone to the recent comedy, Thelma, and even shares part of the supporting cast: Malcolm MacDowell and Richard Roundtree. Roundtree passed away last year after bursting onto the movie scene in the title role as the action anti-hero, Shaft, decades ago. His last few roles showcase what a wonderful actor he was.
It’s probably best to know as little as possible about the main plot, but it concerns an issue many women have dealt with. Fonda and Tomlin play friends who reunite at their old friend’s funeral and reconnect with their late friend’s family, with very different agendas. Fonda plays a woman who gave up on so much in life and now thinks she sees a way to get something important back. Tomlin is a retired musician who came out of the closet late in life.
Both actresses are having a welcome career renaissance. Fonda, a two-time Best Actress Oscar winner who was a top movie star in the early ’70s, dropped out of acting from 1990-2005, around the time she was married to media mogul Ted Turner. It’s great to have her back, and she hasn’t lost any of her on-screen presence, even in scenes that may border on cliché.
Tomlin is mainly known as a comic, but she has had some wonderful dramatic roles as well, notably in Robert Altman’s Nashville, where she was a standout in a star-studded cast and earned an Oscar nomination. It’s fun to see both women bickering away again.
A different kind of moving on is the subject of the sad but gentle documentary, Where Will You Go, by Eitan Cohen. It’s about two best friends in their 80s who were evacuated from Sderot to Tel Aviv on October 7. It will air on Hot 8 and Hot VOD on September 12 at 9:15 p.m., and at 9:20 p.m. that day on YesDocu, as well as YesVOD.
The documentary is a testament to an enduring friendship between two women who must cope with the dislocations of war and find their place in a city where they will never feel at home.