HBO's Our Boys is "tragically relevant"
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"The timing of the release of Our Boys couldn’t be more tragically relevant," says Abraham Riesman. "The ten-part miniseries, which debuts on HBO Monday night, may be a docudrama set thousands of miles away from the United States, but it centers around something that’s all too familiar to Americans in the wake of the recent mass shooting in El Paso, Texas: racist, right-wing, politically motivated murder. Although the show’s Israeli and Palestinian creators couldn’t have anticipated that specific juxtaposition, they were long aware of the fact that they were telling a story not just about three Jewish extremists’ real-life murder of an Arab teenager in Jerusalem in 2014, but also about the ways in which nationalist violence rots away the soul of both the Jewish state and the Land of the Free."
ALSO:
- Who exactly is the audience for Our Boys?: "Adaptations of Israeli dramas have been popular across seas (Showtime's Homeland, HBO's Euphoria) and spy thrillers inspired by Israeli politics have been critical hits in the U.S. (The Honourable Woman)," says Robyn Bahr. "But this isn't an adaptation — this is a story steeped in the minutiae of Israeli culture and Israeli-Palestinian politics that go well beyond Jew versus Muslim. If the viewer does not have a passing knowledge of the innumerable conflicts between secular Israelis and ultra-Orthodox Jews, the socioeconomic stratification of Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, or the in-fighting between extremist factions within Haredi Judaism, then they might be more than a little lost watching this program."
- Our Boys' themes about devastated families caught up in historic grievances and governments at a loss regarding how to address them, sadly, crosses many borders
- Our Boys recalls the authenticity and intensity of The Wire, putting a human face on an age-old conflict
- Inside the complicated Israeli-Palestinian Our Boys writing team: "This wasn't a smooth collaboration"
