Series director Maria Schrader, acclaimed German star of Aimee & Jaguar among other films, is left to provide some of the shading that the scripts do not and she stages wonderful scenes of Jewish ritual - including an extended wedding that puts to shame TV’s more traditional “If they break a glass, that’s Jewish enough!” treatment of religious nuptials.
Their investigations through Berlin, featuring an ominously looming gun, are easily the show’s least convincing element.
There’s ample nuance even in the portrait of the offending sect here, but that nuance comes amid scenes that will make it impossible for viewers to try to understand Yanky and Moishe - though Rahav’s performance is, ultimately, quite complicated, veering from initially cartoonish to sympathetically (if probably irredeemably) flawed.
There’s a description of the show that goes, “A young woman runs away from the nightmares of Orthodox Judaism” that I’m pretty sure the creators wouldn’t want.
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His existence implies gradations of Orthodox and Hasidic life that the show just expects viewers to get or can’t figure out how to illustrate. After all, Moishe the renegade continues to lay tefillin and wear traditional head coverings, yet he isn’t welcome in his former corner of Williamsburg anymore. I have an easy time imagining viewers watching Unorthodox and determining that the series’ villains are representative examples of Orthodox Judaism or of Hasidism and I don’t think that’s the intended reaction. This is something series scribes Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski probably needed to address more effectively. It will be a challenge for viewers with no sense of Orthodox Judaism to make sense of the differences between the general devotion of the faith and the specifics of this Williamsburg-based group, with its liberal use of Yiddish and relationship with Israel and the Holocaust. The eyes pull you in, and it’s almost unthinkable how the series would work with a less convincing performance, especially since Esty’s new cohort is composed of characters who barely have names, much less personality traits. Boasting the stylish fragility of a shaved head - Esty, who presumably hasn’t seen Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta, is surprised when people admire her edgy hairdo - Haas has a visage that’s at least 50 percent eyes and she spends the series on the constant brink of tears, happy and sad. Esty is apparently 19 for the bulk of the show, but Haas has to embody a character who has been sequestered into near childlike innocence and yet has been forced by circumstance to be mature well beyond her years. Haas’ task here is prodigious, as is what she achieves. This act scandalizes Esty’s husband, Yakov (Amit Rahav) - called Yanky throughout - and he’s sent on a mission to Berlin, accompanied by Moishe (Jeff Wilbusch), a more secular Hasid previously ostracized from the community for infractions that may or may not relate to his smoking, his gambling or his possession of a smartphone.Īs Esty finds a new home with an impeccably diverse, barely sketched-in community of musicians at a Berlin conservatory and Yanky and Moishe play Orthodox detectives in Berlin - think Shylock Holmes, I guess - we get flashbacks to the joyful, then harrowing, then disturbing background of her upbringing, marriage and escape. In the opening scene, Esther leaves everything behind - due to a broken eruv outside of her apartment building, which points to the level of specificity at work here - and flies off to Berlin. Haas plays Esther Shapiro - called Esty throughout - a young woman in an insular Hasidic community in Brooklyn.
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