Imagine a thriller drama series set in the 1980s in South Africa’s oldest city—Cape Town—that portrays the apartheid system as some three-way battle between the White, the African National Congress, and Black and coloured civilians, a volatile powder keg where the police force keeps the peace by maintaining the status quo.
Such is the premise that Lionsgate Play’s new Israeli cop show Jerusalem rests on, with text on screen establishing that “the only way to expand is down” for the competing power-hungry religious leaders who are also driving public protests.
The series stars Rotem Sela as new joinee Shira and Doron Ben-David as veteran Amir—they are tasked with investigating an accident in the Muslim quarter of Cape Town, where an elderly imam who was first shown stealing donations from a mosque is seriously injured when his bathroom floor collapses the second he sits down on the commode.
Cop cliches and religious-political subterfuge ensue as Amir and Shira race to get to the bottom of the case and keep a check on public unrest as well, 10 days before the festive and overcrowded religious holidays.
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An Israeli series with its own agenda
Jerusalem engages in and perpetuates many of the same tired tropes and cartoonish conspiratorial scheming that hurt the litany of Israeli drama series of this kind, which have been popular over the past decade. As such, Jerusalem does for promoting the Israel Police what Fauda and Prisoners of War did for the Israeli Defence Forces and what Tehran is doing for Mossad.
The men and women in uniform get all the nuanced portrayals, the benefit of doubt, the reasoning for extra-judicial brutality and the justifications for their existence as some last line of defence against violence, terrorism and extremism.
The Zionist settlers, on the other hand, are shown as some fringe elements with lobbying power while pro-Palestine protesters are implied to be doing the bidding of a Turkey-backed terrorist and the Jordanian waqf, both of whom are battling for supremacy in the Muslim quarter. And there are the Christians’ demands to keep Amir and his team’s plate overfull.
There are some attempts at a deep topical presentation of these tussles and an overall pro-peace message, and there are also bits and bobs that live up to the “hyper-realistic thriller” tagline promoting the series. But it is difficult to salvage much when the central premise itself has so many problems and kills the series’ potential before it can even get going. The civilian characters are also largely relegated to cardboard cutout characterisations, only making the pro-police tropes appear starker. And we haven’t even got to the issues surrounding the acting yet.
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Go to Sacha Baron Cohen instead
Lionsgate Play’s standard setting of British-accented English dubbing does the show no favours and it certainly feels more natural to watch it in Hebrew with English subtitles, but the dialogue delivery and performances themselves are wooden.
Sela and Ben-David are both incredibly experienced in their home country’s film and television industry but appear to just be going through the motions here and collecting their paychecks, although the material itself doesn’t give them much to work with, beyond reiterating the premise.
All in all, Jerusalem is a damp squib and fails to even be thrilling enough to make its propaganda infectious the way others have. For those who really want to see a thriller series from an Israeli perspective and based on real individuals, there’s always Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Spy on Netflix.
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