A Dystopia and an Archaeology Series: Two Top Shows to Watch in Israel This Weekend

By Hannah Brown, Published on the Jerusalem Post | July 11, 2025

“Wonder”, a dystopian story featuring Noa Kirel, and “Pirates of Antiquities”, an archaeological special.

Wonder is a new dystopian thriller Israeli series on Yes TV Drama, Yes VOD, and Sting+. While I was expecting some fairly soapy teen drama because of pop star Noa Kirel’s presence, I was pleasantly surprised by how gripping and intelligent it is. It was produced by Yes TV, Ananey Studios, and Paramount and was created and written by Yishai Orian and Yair Sagi.

Kirel’s character, Noya, is at the center of the story, but she is only seen in flashbacks and clips, because we find out in the first scene that she has been killed in a traffic accident.

Her father, Avner (Moris Cohen), a high-ranking police official, has just taken early retirement, and he wants to find out more about her death. He begins an investigation that leads him to Daria (Yovel Lewkowski), one of her friends, and he starts learning more about the life Noya kept secret from her parents, which centered around a Tel Aviv club.

But there’s much more to it than that. Daria is an influencer who records the world through “Viralz,” a kind of contact lens that makes the wearer’s eyes look really weird and also allows them to see a kind of augmented reality. It’s just a notch removed from Google Glass (which played a central role in the zombie thriller Jeruzalem by the Paz brothers), but much stranger and more threatening, and Avner begins to delve into it.

At the same time, a nerdy, religious police investigator, Amit (Daniel Assayag), is tasked with looking into another accidental teen death, and he also begins to suspect that there was more to it than a simple accident. As he investigates, he learns that there has been a huge increase in teens having psychotic breaks with no previous history of mental problems.

Part of what makes the series so dark is that when he tries to tell his superior about what he has discovered, his boss doesn’t care at all. It’s sadly believable that everyone expects teens to be freaking out all the time and no one is concerned. His only ally on the police force is a very secular cyber investigator played by the always enjoyable Suzanna Papian.

Another dystopian touch is that Noya’s mother, Revital (Keren Berger), does marketing for a company called Great Minds that tries to harness the power of Viralz and introduce them into high-school classrooms, so that school just becomes another place to tune out of reality, while her company makes money. She becomes concerned when a dove flies into a classroom and no one looks up because they are all so focused on the trippy augmented reality the Viralz deliver.

The performances are excellent, and the suspense builds with each episode. I’ve seen the first four, which were released to the press. There are hints of what ties all these threads together, but I won’t spoil the fun of it unfolding gradually. People with epilepsy should be aware that many scenes feature flashing lights.

Anything that involves people with creepy eyes, like 1960 horror classic Village of the Damned, quickly creates a sense of menace. Wonder also reminded me of a very prescient 1980 sci-fi film by Bertrand Tavernier, Death Watch, that depicts a future in which almost all disease has been eradicated. A character played by Harvey Keitel who has camera implants in his brain secretly records the last months of a terminally ill woman (Romy Schneider) with his eyes for a sick reality TV show, and it also features Harry Dean Stanton as a heartless TV producer. It’s worth seeing if you can find it anywhere.

Anyone interested in archaeology and antiquities will want to see the five-episode Kan series Pirates of Antiquities, which just started running on Thursdays after the news and which can be seen on kan.org.il The series offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of antiquities robbers in Israel.

It follows Amir Ganor, the director of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Robbery Prevention Unit, and his staff, who are tasked with the daunting job of preventing the looting and theft of historically valuable antiquities throughout the country. As the series details, the problem is that the thieves often know the terrain far better than those who police them.

The series, which is done with a lot of explanation and many stylistic flourishes to make it accessible to audiences who are not knowledgeable about the subject, is clearly meant to imitate an installment in the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie series as much as possible.

The case the first episode focuses on is Ganor’s attempt to catch thieves in 2004 who discovered fragments of a valuable scroll, believed to be part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The trail to find this scroll is as full of twists and turns as any piece of fiction, and subsequent episodes will focus on other incidents and the full process of discovering and dating such scrolls.

It’s an incredibly difficult assignment, since the highly sophisticated thieves, some of whom come from local Bedouin tribes and some who don’t, know that each hidden ancient treasure they unearth will net them millions. Ganor and his staff have to try to outsmart them across vast deserts, and this makes for dramatic TV. Pirates of Antiquities was created by Tzivka Binder for Kan and Ananey Studios Paramount.