TV bloggers soak up local material

A group of international TV and technology bloggers spent most of last week making the rounds of Israel’s best-known TV shows, meeting directors, producers and actors in the local scene.

“It was a great experience,” said Jessica Reese, digital editor for Cynopsis, which puts out trade publications. “I was surprised as to how candid Israeli TV professionals were with me here. In the US, major TV professionals are usually coached to give fluffy responses and it’s a battle to get a real opinion that can be used for my publication.”

In Israel, however, Reese said, she and her colleagues partied with MTV Israel executives, hung out at the AOL Israel offices with “very successful” tech start-ups, and went on a jeep adventure near the Dead Sea with the “Yellow Peppers” TV show’s creator Keren Margalit and lead actress Alma Zack.

“You don’t get much more intimate than discussing the TV business with Keren in between screaming at the top of your lungs in the back of a jeep hoping you make it to the end alive,” she said.

The bloggers, including Reese, Daniel Malen of theTVAddict, Jordan Chariton from The Wrap, Romy Kraus from EMC’s The Showrunner Magazine, and Oliver Franklin-Wallis from Wired UK, were hosted by VIBE Israel, a local nonprofit organization that brings bloggers in various areas to Israel to meet their counterparts and gain a different angle on the country.

Last week’s group of bloggers spent time at the INTV (Innovative TV) conference in Jerusalem, hosted by the local Keshet media group. They also made dinner with some of the chefs from “Chef Games,” a new take on the reality cooking genre, and watched the premiere of USA Network’s archaeology drama “Dig,” a TV series which is on its third episode in the US.

“You just wouldn’t have that kind of access to producers in the States,” said Reese.

Daniel Malen, Toronto’s TV Addict, agreed.

Malen admitted that he hadn’t been in Israel for 20 years, since “my sister’s bat mitzvah,” but felt the trip allowed him to see “how the people who live here see Israel,” he said,

Like Reese and some of the other bloggers, he knew about Israel’s bigger TV successes, such as “Homeland,” based on Israeli TV show “Hatufim,” and “In Treatment,” driven by the local “B’Tipul.”

“Every once in a while, I’d read about a show that was sold,” said Malen. “What I know now is that they have to work a lot harder for a lot less money and the budgetary constrictions have led to creative thinking.”

Malen said he found himself asking everyone he met about their army experiences, thinking that something about that particular rite of passage makes Israelis less narcissistic and changes them in some crucial way.

“There’s such a personal detachment in North American culture, we’re all on our iPhones,” he said. “Forcing people to go to the army changes people; there are so many creative people here, and I’m wondering whether something might have happened to them as soldiers.”

Malen was impressed by the set of “Chef Games,” in which the chef judges have to blindly vote for dishes cooked by both professionals and amateurs without first meeting the cooks.

“I’m a Survivor!!!” he announced on Twitter, having made it past the chefs’ discerning judgments in a mock trial of the show.

“It was the first actual physical set we visited, and having been to a lot of sets, it was like in Los Angeles,” he said. “It was huge, expensive, it was fantastic.”

Malen, like his fellow travelers, was also “blown away” by the show “Yellow Peppers,” and wants to bring it back to Canada.

“Everything about that was so good,” he said.

The show, about a family that farms yellow peppers in Israel’s south and deals with the realization that their child is autistic, was purchased by the UK’s BBC from Keshet. The English version, which will be called “The ‘A’ Word,” will be filmed this summer and broadcast in 2016.