Award-winning show about comic jailed as a teen comes to Netflix
Israel’s ‘Bad Boy’ stars comedian Daniel Chen and is inspired by his years served in juvenile detention
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
The new, award-winning Israeli TV drama “Bad Boy,” which swept the recent Israeli Television Academy awards ceremony with seven wins, including Best Drama Series and Best Director, will premiere globally on May 2 on Netflix.
The drama, created by Ron Leshem (“Euphoria”, “Valley of Tears”) and Hagar Ben-Asher (“The Slut”, “Mish’olim”), stars comedian Daniel Chen and is inspired by Chen’s teenage years, when he was held for four years in juvenile detention.
The eight-episode series is powerful, painful and sometimes funny, shuttling back and forth in time as Dean, Chen’s character, is seized from his home as a 13-year-old delinquent (played by Guy Manster) and thrown into a grim prison for juvenile offenders — and jumps to his present as a successful comic (acted by Chen) haunted by his past.
First launched on Israel’s Hot cable channel in November 2024, “Bad Boy” tells the story of Dean’s time in jail, where he bonds with Zion Zoro, a whippet-thin, Ethiopian-Israeli teenage prisoner (Havtamo Farda) serving time for murder.
Dean is clever and quick-witted, traits that define him as a troubled teenager and as a star comic. He delves into parts of his past in his standup comedy routine, but keeps most of his history a secret, and they are those secrets that threaten him as an adult in “Bad Boy.”
The cast, most of whom are not professionals and are acting for the first time, also includes the excellent Liraz Chamami (“Asylum City”) as the cleverly elegant prison warden Heli, and Neta Plotnik as Tamara Sheyman, Dean’s troubled but seemingly loving mother.
Chen has said in interviews that he had already thought about the juvenile prison experience as the basis for a TV show while he was incarcerated.
“When I was in prison, we would watch ‘Oz,’ ‘Zinzana,’ and ‘Merhav Yarkon’ on TV all the time,” Chen told Channel 12 news. “Crime series, about prison. We would wait for it, especially ‘Oz.’ It’s a hardcore series that didn’t pity the viewer, and at the same time, I lived in a tough world similar to that. I said to my cellmate: ‘Do you know what we need a series about? About us.'”
Co-creator Ron Leshem, a former investigative journalist, has said that “Bad Boy” harkens back to a story he wrote 20 years earlier about pre-pubescent teens in a juvenile prison, who were jailed together with more hardcore, older teen criminals.
He had tried to make that story work for some time as a series, but it was the pairing with Daniel Chen that made “Bad Boy” come together as a TV show.
“There is something brilliant in telling a story about someone who has a shitty life but sees everything through humor,” Leshem told Deadline.
The series is produced and co-financed by The North Road Company and Sipur, with Ben-Asher directing the eight-part series and Leshem serving as showrunner.
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