You know someone like him, this man-child, this feverish spouter of a thousand hare-brained schemes. He’s electric in all the wrong ways, projecting so much manic energy that he must have spent his childhood zapped on Pixy Sticks, which he only exchanged a few years ago for some off-brand Ritalin that he keeps in a bedazzled change purse. There was one of him at your high school, or summer camp, or on your Birthright trip, where a shitty trucker hat sat deliberately askew on his head and every statement, every mind-numbing boast and useless demonstration of ability, led to mass eye-rolling. Now, he drives a pre-owned Acura Legend and secretly works at Lady Foot Locker, but he aspires to so much more. You also know him as Jean-Ralphio Saperstein (Ben Schwartz) on Parks and Recreation, the distilled concentrate of every status-obsessed male JAP with dollar signs in his eyes, who thinks that club owner is a calling of the highest order and that he’s one lucky roll away from sitting courtside with Jay-Z and Beyoncé.

The occasional sidekick (and, naturally, business partner) of the slightly more composed Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari), Jean-Ralphio has the approximate physique and metabolism of a pogo stick. He performs the most Krameresque entry into scenes since Kramer himself, except Jean-Ralphio filigrees his performances with absurdist raps. With his wild mop of thick black hair and his tendency to arrive unwelcome and in media res, he’s indeed part of the Kramer lineage, albeit filtered through the Jock Jams catalog.

Jean-Ralphio began as Tom’s brother-in-arms—or more accurately, his hype man—with the two collaborating on a near-toxic designer alcohol and, later, on an outlandishly extravagant production company called Entertainment 720. The particulars of these ventures don’t matter: they are ensured of their eventual, usually swift, failure. They are foolish plans, but they always have a brief, illusory moment of coruscating success, when the alcohol is flowing and the money is too—albeit, away from them—and it seems they must be on the cusp of something great. Of course, they aren’t, and they only aspire to the most superficial kind of success, to be rich and famous, surrounded by photoshopped women, their mansions loaded with garish designer clothing, men’s grooming products, and piles of Asian electronics. They have seen too many ’90s hip-hop music videos to have any other dreams.

My favorite Jean-Ralphio idea is one of his most fleeting. The “Li’l Sebastian” episode cold opens with Tom and Jean-Ralphio sitting in an office, throwing business ideas back and forth. (We later learn that Jean-Ralphio got a nice cash settlement from being run over by a Lexus. “I made my money the old fashioned way,” he says. He’s enormously proud.) Jean-Ralphio leans back confidently, as if he finally has hit upon the big one. He says:

This is for certain, okay? I create a game show … two people on stage, right? They flip a coin; one of them has to perform open-heart surgery, the other one has to receive open heart surgery. We call it: “Open Heart Surgery.”

All jokes lose something in the retelling, but this has all the Jean-Ralphio hallmarks: showbiz, a gauche manipulation of customers, a core idea that goes beyond impractical into the truly fantastical. Best is the look on his face when he tells it—his raised eyebrows and bugged-out eyes, his hands already arranging the contestants before him, all of it reflecting the absolute conviction that this is a great idea, this is the thing that’ll make them. For those few seconds, he believes it totally.

And with the same gale-force speed with which it appeared, it’s gone. Tom counters with a plan to buy G4 jets (“already interested,” Jean-Ralphio says), take the wheels off (“get ’em off of there”), and let people live inside. That too gives way, until they settle on Entertainment 720—which proves to be their most costly failure, wiping out Jean-Ralphio’s settlement from the car accident.

Failure is Jean-Ralphio’s metier. In many ways, he is a classic schlemiel, a bumbler who can’t do anything right. And he is undeniably a boor. But his outlandish behavior is coupled with an apple-cheeked earnestness that makes me wonder if he’s something of a holy fool. In the Christian tradition, a holy fool gives up everything to serve Jesus; he also acts insane, a deliberate put-on that conceals an inner perfection, for he has achieved the ascetic ideal. The Jewish Jean-Ralphio sacrifices everything to serve a different god: capitalism. His insanity conceals the ultimate uselessness of his sacrifice, which makes him an ironic figure—as every schlemiel is—but, strangely, also a blessed one.

Parks and Recreation is a sitcom, but it tends, like its progenitor, The Office, to braid its humor with heart and plot, the result being that characters must submit to pesky concepts like personal growth and self-examination. Tom Haverford eventually realized that, in order to reach his potential as a businessman, he had to cast off the ludicrously irresponsible Jean-Ralphio. The brotherhood fractured, and we’ve seen little of Jean-Ralphio in the latest season. (Schwartz is also busy playing an aggressive corporate management consultant on Showtime’s House of Lies. There’s some kinship between those two characters.)

This is all for the worse. Jean-Ralphio belongs on Parks and Rec not only because he’s a sheer joy to watch—Schwartz is a marvelously physical actor—but also because he’s a pure instantiation of the show’s original satiric impulse. He exists to make us lampoon everything he represents: love of money, social cachet, consumerism, all those high school-level desires that tend to stick around and become more amplified precisely when we’re supposed to age out of them. Without Jean-Ralphio, and with Tom neutered, Parks and Rec’s antic energy has been tamped down. The jokes are still solid, there are love stories to root for, but this is what it’s like when a show enters middle age. It leaves behind the mad energy of youth.

Previously on Network Jews:

Shoshanna, the scene-stealing afterthought on Girls.

Ruxin, the fantasy football-obsessed jerk on The League.

Tommy Pickles, the heroic cartoon baby on Rugrats.

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When Homeland returns for a second season this Sunday night, it will be able to boast a bevy of Emmy’s and claim Barack Obama as a fanboy. But perhaps its most noted distinction is indirectly leading to the creation of America’s new catchphrase—“Mandy Patinkin, holla.” As I’m sure you know, Homeland is an adaptation of the Israeli TV series Hatufim, Prisoners of War, and is only one in a flood of programming coming out of the Israeli-Hollywood pipeline. Just last week Universal Television bought rights to The Gordin Cell, a series following former Russian intelligence agents reintegrating themselves in Israel.

There have been various hypotheses offered for the recent obsession with Israeli television: Israelis, they’re just like us! 9/11! And inevitably—Jews run Hollywood. Showtime and HBO as well as all the major networks have at least one Israeli television adaptation in the works.

But the Israeli TV shopping spree hasn’t been particularly discriminatory and results vary: The sitcom The Ex-List was canceled after only four episodes, and the reality show 3 got the axe after two. And while the success and failure of a show can be a crapshoot, there does seem to be a pattern in whether or not a series has crossover success.

America has a long history of adapting TV shows from other countries. Iconic American classics such as All in the Family and Three’s Company were modeled on British shows. More recently, the U.K. has given us the soon-to-be-put-out-of-its-misery series, The Office, as well as NBC’s Prime Suspect and MTV’s Skins—both failures. In the hunt for new ideas, producers have turned to other countries; AMC’s The Killing, for example, was based on a popular Danish program.

Sharon Shaif, who co-edited the book Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders and is currently writing a book on Israeli reality television, told me that traditionally, the rule of thumb when scouring for potential crossover hits is to find programs that are “culturally neutral” and adhere to established formulas. For Israel, though, the lesson has been almost the opposite. The Israeli shows that have succeeded in the United States have been steeped in Israeli cultural concerns, from war and terrorism to the specter of the Holocaust.

HBO’s In Treatment, the most successful Israeli crossover before Homeland, is a case in point. Adapted from the Israeli hit B’tipul, the show centers on a psychologist, with each episode depicting a therapy session. The patients in the Israeli version included a pilot, whose father is a Holocaust survivor, grappling with having bombed an Arab school; a couple deciding whether or not to have an abortion; and a childless woman in her 30s from a traditionally conservative Mizrachi family. The U.S. script follows the Israeli version almost word-for-word, only changing Israel-specific details, such as turning the pilot into an Iraqi war veteran.

Hatufim, which aired on Arutz 2 in 2010, is even more predicated on the Israeli context. The show revolves around the return of two Israel Defense Forces soldiers who were held in captivity in Lebanon for 17 years, and thus hits on one of Israel’s most sensitive nerves: the culture of the abducted soldier. While the series was successful, it had many detractors, who accused writer and director Gideon Raff of exploiting the issue at a time when Gilad Shalit was still in captivity.

Though Raff consulted on the U.S. version and serves as its executive producer, the series diverges sharply from its Israeli model, and with good reason: returning soldiers don’t have the same hold on the national mindset in America. So while Homeland takes as its premise a U.S. Marine returning home after being held captive by Al-Qaida since 2003, it adds an element of suspense to the mix with Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a CIA operations officer who suspects he may have been turned.

While Hatufim and B’Tipul didn’t offer culturally neutral source material (far from it), they gave Hollywood something even more valuable: fresh ideas. The shows are unlike anything on American television, not only in theme, but in genre. For viewers used to network cop shows or cable series focused on tormented male anti-heroes, a show set entirely in a therapist’s office is nothing if not different. And Israeli television is a fertile ground for dramas that don’t conform to American models. “Israel is not wedded to the usual procedural formats—lawyer, cop, etc.,” says Shaif.

Not so with comedy. Israelis grew up on a steady diet of imported American sitcoms—the first Israeli sitcom, Krovim, Krovim, only premiered in 1983. Today many of Israel’s comedies mimic the classic sitcoms of the ’80s and ’90s. The familiar tropes are there—the plots are driven by misunderstandings; men are constantly screwing up and spend an episode working to hide it from their wives who will inevitably find out; children are a bit too precocious.

With contemporary popular American comedies trending toward meta-references and fast-paced jokes, it is not much of a surprise that American audiences would shy away from shows imitating Israeli shows that imitate American shows from 20 years ago. Take last year’s Traffic Light. The Fox show was based on Ramzor, a hit show in Israel. Now in its fourth season, the Israeli show follows three men at different stages in life: Itzko is married with a kid, Amir lives with his girlfriend, and Hefer is the perennial bachelor of the bunch. The show won an Israeli TV Academy Award for best comedy and became the first Israeli TV series to win an International Emmy Award for best comedy series.

Fox heavily promoted the show, which premiered in February 2011, but with dismal ratings it only lasted through May. Looking at the source material, one could guess why the show failed. In one episode, Itzko’s wife gives him two bags—one filled with old clothes to donate to African refuges and one with a Prada dress she needs dry cleaned. If you have ever watched an episode of Home Improvement you can easily guess that he gives away the wrong bag, his wife finds out, and hijinks ensue as he is forced to go down to the refugee shelter to get it back.

This doesn’t mean that all Israeli dramas are good, and Israeli comedies bad. Arab Labor, for example, the first Israeli sitcom to center around an Arab-Israeli family is both radical in its subject matter and riotously funny. But it may be a sign that the American audience is on the hunt for television that seems non-prepackaged, something that Israeli dramas are able to offer. And once Israeli sitcoms find their own voice, they may succeed here as well. And if anyone from Keshet is out there, I’m pretty sure a comedy centered on a multigenerational family that runs a Sabich stand in Tel Aviv is pure gold—remember to thank me at the Emmys.

The post Is That a Falafel in My Situation Comedy? appeared first on Jewcy.

From the moment he first appeared on Showtime’s pot-centric comedy, Weeds, Andy Botwin (Justin Kirk) has loudly and proudly flaunted his Judaism. After arriving four episodes into the series as the brother of Judah, the recently deceased husband of shiksa-turned-pot-dealing mom Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker), Andy demanded to be the center of attention, letting his sexual impulses guide him from one disaster to the next.

While the show may be best known for breaking ground in the female-anti-hero genre, (Mary-Louise Parker’s drug dealer preceded Nurse Jackie and Damages,) in recent years, it has taken some odd geographical- and plot-based twists, which the new main-title sequence humorously depicts. And while the somewhat mixed series comes to a close this Sunday after eight seasons, throughout it all, it’s been hard not to love moocher Andy, the promiscuous playboy who keeps finding his way back to his Jewish roots.

What’s most wonderfully—and unexpectedly—refreshing about Andy is his very real relationship with Judaism. Even if a segment of the companion Web series University of Andy features a common TV concept—Christmukkah—most of Andy’s Jewish experiences are far less Seth Cohen than that. When Andy enrolled in rabbinical school during the show’s second season—to escape being called up for reserve duty and sent to Iraq, of course—he was seen listening to recorded prayers and participating in communal Israeli dancing.

But in this final season, a chance meeting with a rabbi at a hospital has enabled him to get his most stable job yet, as director of spiritual life in the synagogue’s Hebrew school. Though Andy may spend most of his life acting like an irresponsible clown, he’s capable of getting serious and teaching the next generation surprisingly accurate and detailed intricacies of the Jewish faith: It’s rare to find a TV character capable of captivating pre-pubescent boys equally with a rather graphic masturbation lesson and a lecture on why the Torah is not meant to be interpreted literally.

But even Andy’s biggest fan has to acknowledge that he most frequently invokes his Judaism as a get out of jail free card. Shirking military service by entering rabbinical school was hardly a great start, and Andy’s motivations for becoming an active Jew are never pure. Even his latest job resulted from an unplanned pregnancy out of wedlock. Yet on a show filled with liars and criminals—a pot dealer, a drug cartel, and a handful of other unscrupulous, corruption-prone people—Andy is the most endearing character. Though he spent most of his stint in rabbinical school trying to sleep with admissions director Yael Hoffman (Israeli actress Meital Dohan), he came away with a renewed sense of pride and peoplehood that shows in his new academic capacity.

That’s not to suggest that Andy’s charm can get him out of every situation. He doesn’t always see things through, and he is distracted by the presence of either women or pot. He tends to get caught up in his schemes and overly attached to temporary situations, in which he and his drug-dealing family often find themselves. Yet through it all, he’s genuine: The lies he tells and the stories he makes up don’t last because his conscience gets the best of him. As he eyes and beds new women, he expresses his affection and takes a deep interest in each and every one of them. His actions may not be explicitly guided by Jewish values, but, time after time, he keeps coming back to a Jewish way of life.

Andy doesn’t purport to be the most knowledgeable Jew out there: He is the ultimate example of imperfection, and it’s hard not to root for—or relate to—someone who has good intentions and isn’t always able to live up to them. As the show nears its end, he has been looking back at his life and his decisions, demonstrating exceptional growth after eight years of marijuana, women, and bad choices. Ultimately, for Andy the ends do justify the means, and the way he got somewhere is less important than what he’s achieved, building a truly unique legacy for himself as TV’s most knowledgeable Jewish slacker.

Previously on Network Jews:

Saul Berneson, the CIA Middle East division chief on Homeland

Cristina Yang, Grey’s Anatomy’s Atheist Jew

Ross Geller, the nerdy paleontologist on Friends

The post Network Jews: Andy Botwin from Showtime’s Pot Comedy ‘Weeds’ appeared first on Jewcy.

Though Carrie Matheson (Claire Danes) is the main character of Showtime’s tense CIA drama Homeland (which returns for a second season September 30th), Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) is the force binding the show’s combustible elements together and propelling the action forward. Patinkin deserves a heap of credit: anyone who can play both Inigo Montoya and Che in Evita is a hall of famer. Still, Saul’s centrality is especially interesting because Jewish identity rests at his character’s core—an identity so richly illustrated, I offer the following proposition: Saul Berenson is the most accurate depiction of an American Jewish identity ever portrayed on television.

There is a scene midway through the first season in which Carrie bets her signed copy of Thelonius Monk’s Monk’s Dream that a polygraph test will incriminate Sergeant Brody. Saul parries: “I prefer Coltrane. Not so fussy.” The Monk-Coltrane dichotomy is an almost too-perfect metaphor for these characters. If Monk’s schizophrenic genius prefigures Carrie, Coltrane’s religious devotion to his craft encapsulates Saul.

Saul is the meticulously brilliant veteran to Carrie’s reckless savant. Steady but irrepressible, he knows exactly when to rein Carrie in and when to spur her forward. When she leaps to conclusions, he challenges her theories: “The dots are there Carrie, but you haven’t connected them yet.” Before one interrogation, Saul delivers a strangely effective pep talk: “You good? It’s good that you’re good. Good is a good thing. Carrie? Eviscerate the motherfucker.”

Saul also pushes the higher-ups to be assertive, daring, and unconventional. When the CIA nabs the American terrorist Aileen at the Mexican border, Saul convinces Estes to let him drive her back to D.C. Saul can persuade her to talk in the car; in D.C., she’ll stonewall. He “gets” her he says—and he gets her to finger Tom Walker, a huge break in a case that was going cold.

Through all of Saul’s orchestration and discovery, his fiercely cultural Judaism surfaces repeatedly. Some of these references are boilerplate. What Jew doesn’t believe chicken soup is the “elixir of the gods?”

Many are more complex. When Carrie blunderingly comes on to Saul after he discovers her illegal surveillance, he is horrified. She destroyed their trust, he hisses, when she treated him “like them—like every other schmup in this building.” Saul’s first yiddishism comes at a crucial moment. In Saul’s morality—one clearly influenced by his Jewish roots—Carrie’s misuse of her sexuality with him was grave in its suggestion of the relationship’s phoniness.

Homeland (loosely based on the Israeli drama Prisoners of War), though, pushes its exploration of Saul’s Judaism further. Viewers learn the most about Saul’s background through his conversations with Aileen. Saul expresses sympathy with Aileen, whose father was horrified at her relationship with a “little brown boy.” Aileen assumes Saul’s concern is artificial—“what do you know about it?” Saul replies, “more than nothing. I married a brown girl.” Saul leverages his personal narrative to gain Aileen’s trust, but that narrative is telling in its own right. Saul subtly indicates his family’s dismay that he married outside the faith.

The revelation is only Saul’s introduction. In one of the show’s brilliant scenes, Saul takes Aileen to the remnants of the makeshift synagogue in rural Indiana where he and his family prayed. He tells Aileen of the strict orders not to assimilate and his dutiful obedience to the prohibition on singing Christmas carols. He hated the synagogue—it was the reason why he was “different, strange, isolated.” “I’d gladly say their prayers, sing their songs,” Saul tells Aileen, “I just wanted to not be alone.” Saul grew up Jewish where that identity engendered alienation. Though as a child he may have wanted to simply blend in, as an adult, Saul ended up where many American Jews do: intermarried and non-observant, but with an intense cultural affinity and Jewish identity.

Jewish identity plays a central role in another critical scene—one whose opacity deeply challenges viewers. Saul interrogates Afsal Hamid, who is initially cooperative. But before Saul and Carrie can extract any further valuable intelligence, Hamid is found to have committed suicide. Looking at the dead body, Saul recites the first lines of kaddish, the prayer over the dead.

Before Carrie interrogates the Saudi diplomat, she reminds Saul he once told her that to extract information, you’re looking for what makes someone human, not a terrorist. Perhaps Saul finds Hamid’s humanity, seeing him break at the prospect of securing his family. Perhaps Saul says the kaddish as a show of respect, mourning the humanity of the dead.

Or perhaps Saul does it for tradition, like Jews who salt their bread irrespective of the day of the week. Saul is a cultural Jew, and he marks Hamid’s death with a formula that has no religious meaning but has cultural significance that transcends rational understanding.

But the most compelling explanation is that Saul loves his work religiously and mourns what he thinks may be the death of his case. Saul uses a ritual with deep religious significance as a grieving mechanism for his work. The kaddish isn’t for Hamid—it’s for himself.

I cannot think about Saul’s kaddish without returning to his appreciation for John Coltrane. Coltrane cut A Love Supreme after recovering from drug addiction and throwing himself into his music with unparalleled devotion. It’s the same devotion Saul shows to his own work. With his wife leaving for India and his marriage in jeopardy, Saul pleads guilty: “It’s my weakness. My Achilles heel. Every time they call me, I go.” Indeed.

At every key moment, there is Saul—playing an integral role only he can perform. “I was weaned on inter-agency non-cooperation. Nothing makes me happier than seeing the FBI stand around with their dicks in their hands, watching us work.” It’s why Saul shmears peanut butter on crackers with a ruler in the dead of night at Langley. It’s why he stays in D.C. when the love of his life returns to India. And it’s why Saul’s Judaism surfaces time and again on the job: this is his religion.

Previously on Network Jews:

Cristina Yang, Grey’s Anatomy’s Atheist Jew

Ross Geller, the nerdy paleontologist on Friends

Dr. Glenn Richie, the Jewish doctor on Childrens Hospital

The post Network Jews: Saul Berenson from Showtime’s Homeland appeared first on Jewcy.

Haaretz reports:

Gideon Raff, the writer-director of the Israel show invited Shalit to join the Homeland set Monday, and sat with him as he watched Danes do her takes, sitting in a tall director’s chair behind the Homeland writer-producer Howard Gordon and director Michael Cuesta. Raff was unable to invite Shalit to visit his set of Hatufiim, it turns out, because the last day of their filming took place on the very day Shalit was released.

(Photo credit: Jack Guez-Pool/Getty Images)

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