Off-the-Derech Reality TV

Remember the Cholent group from 2007?

the name given to the informal weekly gatherings for Orthodox Jews on the margins of their close-knit society ?

and Gitty Grunwald?

Well, welcome now to "Off the Derech" reality TV:

One of 12 children of a prominent rabbi in the Hasidic community of Boro Park, Luzer Twersky suspected there was more to life than studying the Torah as a youth...after his divorce, the father of two decided to find out for himself what else he was missing.
“My only knowledge of the secular world at that point was from movies and what my parents told me, which is all the goys in the world were murderers, that they’d kill all the Jews if they had the chance," Twersky tells the News. “We’re led to believe that the secular world is one big orgy. Then you go out there and you start meeting people and you realize that’s not true.”

...Now an executive in the fashion industry and a part-time actor, the 26-year-old is one of four cast members of a proposed new reality TV show with the working title, “The Unchosen Ones.” The program...[is]...more about the culture shock that the two men and two women faced in leaving the notoriously insular Orthodox Jewish community. “It’s about twentysomethings who make the decision to leave everything behind, and are now faced with living their lives without help from anyone and very little knowledge of the outside secular world,” says Scheinmann.
...He says he became an atheist after a particularly intense conversation with a stripper during a lap dance. Hey, there was a world out there to learn about.
And almost four years after his divorce, Twersky is finally in a good place, with a shiksa (non-Jewish) girlfriend and a brand-new short haircut that has left him without payot (the curls worn by Hasidim).
“I hope that I set an example for these people that with resilience and with balls, you can go out there and do whatever you want to do,” he says. “What I want these people to see is: It’s worth it just to be able to be yourself.”

To be honest, four good reasons not to watch television. ^

Heard of the "Big Three"?

I don't and didn't know about Blossom but I found this interesting bit about its star:

I remember reading a few years ago - you know, the way rumors spread between Jews - that you were active at UCLA Hillel, and that you'd started getting more observant. Um, are you?

My mother was raised Orthodox, and my grandparents are immigrants from Eastern Europe. I was raised in a Reform household, but with a lot of remnants of Orthodoxy. We lit candles. We had two sets of dishes, but my mom never told me why. I thought it was breakfast dishes and dinner dishes. There was no emphasis on halacha and learning. Totally not to disparage my parents; it just wasn't their thing.

When I went to college, I didn't have a lot of friends. Blossom had ended two years before. I'd always gone away to Jewish camps for the summer, and so I kind of ended up at Hillel and I started learning with the rabbi, and it kind of took off from there.

I'm hesitant to label myself or call myself Orthodox because people will be like, "Celebrity Mayim Bialik says she does X, but I saw her doing Y" - I guess, to be safe, I would say I'm Conservative, but in reality, I'd say Conservadox. But my husband and I have definitely increased our observance over the years, and we're always trying to grow.

We kinda do the Big Three [Shabbos, keeping kosher, and family purity], but it's hard. I mean, it's hard for everyone to classify themselves, but it's a whole new level of hard when people are watching you. Like, I pretty much eat a vegan diet, but I eat eggs if they're in things. What I say is, I eat a mostly vegan diet, and that's kind of how it is with Judaism. We keep Shabbos, we keep kosher, and I don't know if people want to hear about the Mikveh, but, um, yeah.

You can see her in 1989 at a Chabad Telethon here (at 2:20)- "Mayim says L'chayim".

Well, What Do You Think of "Kings"?

James Poniewozik in TIME magazine:

NBC's 'Kings': The New Old Testament

Is it better for a TV show to be consistent or surprising? Is it worse for it to be ridiculous or boring? NBC's unorthodox new drama Kings (Sundays, 8 p.m. E.T.) comes down solidly on the latter side of those questions. Some viewers will say it's fascinating. Others will say it's pretentious hoo-ha. Allow me to split the difference: Kings is fascinating pretentious hoo-ha.

The premise of Kings is unlike that of anything else on TV: a reimagining of the biblical story of David, set in the modern world...

...There's no getting around it: Kings is a bizarre, disorienting hybrid of a show. For starters, there's the language, half-contemporary, half-archaic: "We sign our names, we shake hands, and future ghosts know us for our contributions, not our wars," says Silas at a treaty negotiation. Kings is lucky to have McShane, who, as a philosophical criminal in Deadwood, effortlessly breathed out David Milch's mix of obscenity, frontier talk and Shakespeare. Here, leonine, menacing and thoughtful, he makes Kings' quasi-biblical declamations seem natural...

...Kings' setting — a cleaned-up version of Manhattan — is stunning. You're lulled by familiarity, then rattled by reminders — say, a scribe following on Silas' heels, scribbling hagiography on a tablet computer — that this is a very different place...

...Yet I'd rather watch Kings than a number of other less daring, more consistent dramas. Why? Because it surprises me and takes chances (like basing a drama on religion without being snarky or saccharine). Because it has ambitions that broadcasters have all but ceded to cable, and sometimes it even meets them. Because it creates a world rather than borrowing one. And because I'm willing to be patient with a show that has learned sling-wielding David's timeless lesson: Sometimes it pays to aim big.