Bad Boy
Courtesy of Sipur & North Road
If you loved Adolescence, you’ll probably like Bad Boy. That’s the PR pitch we’ve been getting, at least. Also? It’s true.
Bad Boy, an eight-episode Hebrew-language coming-of-age series that premiered at TIFF in 2023 and aired the following year in Israel, premiered Friday, May 2 on Netflix. The series, co-created and co-written by American-Israeli writer/producer/showrunner Ron Leshem (creator of the original Euphoria and Prisoners of War, which became Homeland here) and filmmaker Hagar Ben Asher (Long Bright River), who also directed each Bad Boy episode, has already won the Israeli equivalent of seven Emmys: best writing, best directing, best sound design & editing, best casting cinematography and best editing at the Israeli Academy for Awards for Television.
The series tells the story of Dean Scheinman (Guy Manster), a teenager imprisoned in a juvenile detention facility for most of his teen years. Scheinman is eventually able to break the cycle of recidivism. As an adult, he changes his name to Daniel Chen and becomes a successful stand-up comedian. If this all sounds far-fetched, it’s not. Bad Boy is based on Scheinman/Chen’s real life story, and Daniel Chen plays the adult version of himself in the series.
How did Leshem stumble across Chen? He didn’t; technically, he stumbled across Scheinman. Leshem, a former journalist, locked himself in an Israeli juvenile prison for two weeks (for research). There, he met Scheinman (as well as other characters depicted in the series, like the real-life Freddie Soosan, Scheinman’s prison tormentor played by Ishay Laloosh).
Leshem had an idea for a show set in juvenile prison. It was called Bad Boy Euphoria. Kind of.
“When I first pitched Euphoria, the original concept … was the voice of a 17-year-old inmate,” Leshem said.
Any outside life was going to be a flashback and Leshem’s main character, the inmate, was to provide the voiceover.
“I told the idea to one of the most powerful drama executives in Hollywood, and she said, ‘Yes, let’s do Oz with kids!’ And I went home, and I realized, I don’t want to live inside Oz with kids. I don’t want to write this thing,” Leshem recalled. “And that was the moment I knew I needed to write something different.”
So, Euphoria was born (and then adapted for the U.S., where Zendaya serves as that very-reimagined narrator character).
Fifteen years after that fateful Oz-with-kids meeting, Leshem reconnected with Chen, who is considered the third co-creator of Bad Boy. In the time they had spent apart, Chen cultivated a nice career as a comic.
“People know him — sometimes he’s even on primetime,” Leshem said.
But until the making of Bad Boy, Chen had never spoken about his past on stage. Leshem said that Chen understood he could never take his career to the next level “unless he started to speak about the truth.”
From the stage is where Chen primarily drives the story of Bad Boy. The show opens with him performing (a real standup set with a real audience), an intentional choice by Leshem to show viewers that his lead character survives, that he’s OK.
Chen’s set, interweaved throughout several episodes, goes fine — it’s hit and miss (there are also probably some translation blips that disservice the wording). That was fine for Leshem, who said he didn’t want the narrative device to “feel like a standup special.”
“We chose the moments on stage where he’s sweating,” Leshem said, “where he’s having a hard time finding the words.”
Bad Boy was a huge success in Israel — both in terms of TV ratings and critical reception — but the most gratifying response has been from other standup comics, Leshem said.
“One thing that like was incredible for us, was how comedians were talking about it as something that reflects the the struggle of a wounded soul, that explains why you become a comedian,” he said.
But Bad Boy isn’t a comedy, it’s a drama. Spreading laughter here and there is cool, but Leshem really wants his show to spread empathy.
“We’re living in an era of the death of truth, the death of so many things…but the empathy is just being slaughtered,” Leshem said. “People don’t feel empathy anymore.”
Netflix is currently working on an American remake of Bad Boy. THR asked Leshem what happens with that project if the original series goes viral here like it did in Israel.
“I don’t know. I’m curious to see,” he said. “I’m praying that this is our problem.”
Bad Boy (Leshem’s Version) is available to stream now on Netflix.