A couple of weeks before it premiered in Israel, the Yes Studios show “Night Therapy” already won accolades and a special award for star Shira Haas at the Monte Carlo Television Festival, making it perhaps the most promising Israeli show of this year.
The series, whose trailer you can now watch with English subtitles, tells the story of Luai “Louie” Mansour, played by the incredible Yousef Sweid, a therapist whose wife dies by suicide, and who is left to pick up the pieces for him and his two young children in their Tel Aviv home. The demands of single parenthood, even with the help of his sister, played by “Fauda” star Lucy Ayoub, who comes to his aid straight from Nazareth, become too much for him, and he decides to make a dramatic switch — offering his patients nighttime therapy sessions, talking to them after his children have gone to bed and the errands of the day are done.
These nocturnal sessions bring out a strange cast of characters, all haunted by different things. There’s Shira Haas’s Yasmin, a reclusive computer genius who, after the death of her father, spends most of her days at home with her mom, working from home and chatting with an online boyfriend, Max. There’s Yaakov Shimantov, played by fellow “Fauda” actor Yaakov Zada-Daniel, a religious man dealing with suicidal ideation. Noam, played by Yaron Brovinsky, is a doctor trying to recover from a traumatic incident at work, and Effie, played by Balkan Beat Box lead singer Tomer Yosef, is a criminal who fell in love and wants to become a father.
In the trailer, we see Mansour at his wife, Shiran’s, grave, later trying to sleep on the floor of their bedroom, unable to fall asleep on their marital bed. His former mother-in-law wonders why Shiran (played by Renana Raz) did what she did, saying she hasn’t left the house since the shiva. His sister, Mira, implores him to keep it together for his children: “They already lost their mother, they can’t lose their father too,” she tells him in Arabic. “What is wrong with me?” a weeping Yasmin wonders, sharing: “I wish I could find someone to love me.”
“If you don’t walk in the dark, you won’t find the light,” Louie gets told in the trailer.
Every performance here is already harrowing, especially Haas, with her tears and deep emotion. In a Hebrew teaser for the show, Yasmin can be seen explaining why she is going to therapy: “My mother is scared that she will die and I’ll be left alone,” she says, adding that she embarrassingly created a fake Tinder account. When Mansour asks how old she is, she is precise to the very minute.
“What’s so beautiful is the way this character is structured,” Haas shared in a promotional video, talking about the progress her character makes from scene to scene, session to session, as she bares herself. The progression of her sessions at the therapist “can be its own short film,” the “Unorthodox” actress mused. You can definitely see a hint of that powerful emotional journey in the trailer.
It was Sweid’s virtuoso talent that made show creator Raanan Caspi believe that he could carry a show of this magnitude. Even if you don’t recognize his name (a fact that I urge you to remedy!) you’ve probably seen him somewhere — in “Game of Thrones” as a freed Meereenese, in Netflix shows like “The Spy,” “Unorthodox” and “Woman of the Dead,” in Israeli movies like “The Bubble,” and shows like “False Flag” and the excellent Sayed Kashua series “The Writer.”
“Something in his eyes, that secret in his eyes, that feeling of danger, it’s the holy grail of actors,” Caspi, who attended acting school when he was younger, told Haaretz. “This woundedness that reflects in the eyes is this thing that all good actors have, and that’s what glues people to the screen.” Sweid’s eyes certainly tell a thousand stories in this moving trailer, and in the show’s teaser, in which his character talks about his life through nighttime scenes in the city. The show was actually shot on a special set in which life-sized LED screens simulated Tel Aviv’s nighttime skyline through the windows, providing the right lighting for the after-dark sessions with patients.
It’s hard not to compare this show to “In Treatment” and its predecessor “BeTipul,” the 2005 Israeli show about a therapist that not only changed the way people around the world saw therapy, but also the way people saw Israeli TV. It was the country’s first big international hit adaptation, with the 2008 HBO show garnering an inspiring number of award nominations, winning a Peabody Award, two Emmys (for star Dianne West and guest star Glynn Turman) and a Golden Globe for lead Gabriel Byrne. (A 2021 reboot of the show starring Uzo Aduba was not renewed, but did earn the actress an Emmy nomination.)
Caspi was certainly inspired by “BeTipul” and his show, just like “In Treatment,” relies on expert opinions from therapists to make it accurate and realistic. One of those experts is Caspi’s own wife; another is an Arab therapist who could speak to what it feels like to be an Arab person treating Jews in Israel — about the power balance and about “things that Jews can say in regular treatment but in front of an Arab therapist, suddenly have different weight,” Caspi revelead to Haaretz.
The field of therapy has changed a lot in the years since the original “BeTipul,” but people around the world, and especially in Israel, still need it so much. In fact, Caspit said that he wishes everyone in Israel could go to therapy.
While the show is about an Arab therapist, Caspi, who wrote it long before October 7, tried to make Sweid’s Arab identity just one small part of the character. He wanted a character that was Arab, but that wasn’t the center of their existence.
“I tried to create something that ignores this thing. It was hard back then, but now, because everything is on steroids, it all has become so risky,” he shared with Haaretz. “A lot of us, the Arabs and the Jews, really feel hopeless and it’s a lot like the state of the characters in the show. But the actors in this series are so good that I want people to see them, to find hope. I don’t want to live in a world with no hope, because otherwise, why am I wasting my time? I have kids, I have a family, I want hope. True, it was destroyed for us, but I believe that our nature is to hold on to hope. And that’s exactly what happens in the show.”
“Night Therapy” premiered in Israel on June 30 and has new episodes airing nightly on Sundays. Here’s hoping that like “In Treatment,” it becomes an international sensation, too.
