Israel’s TV Producers Become Heavy Hitters in Exporting Shows
The homeland of Homeland is among the world’s top idea factories. Now, Israel is aiming to sell its own dramas abroad.
Six years ago, Israeli satellite TV station Yes got a pitch that sounded like a sure loser: a series about the pursuit of a Hamas terror mastermind. Much of the show would be in Arabic, hardly music to the ears of a Hebrew-speaking audience, and many Israelis had grown numb to the Palestinian conflict. “Who was going to watch a TV series focused on that?” recalls Dganit Atias-Gigi, who oversees acquisition of scripted dramas for the network.
Yet she found the characters—both Palestinian and Israeli—richly textured, not simply caricatures. Atias-Gigi approved the series, Fauda (Arabic for “chaos”), and it turned into Yes’s most successful drama ever. In December the show was picked up by Netflix Inc., where it has earned wide praise. “When I saw how both sides responded, my reaction was ‘Wow,’ ” Atias-Gigi says.