Hagai Levi is one of today's most celebrated and innovative TV creators. Originally from Kibbutz Sha'alvim, and now residing in Tel Aviv, he gained international recognition for his groundbreaking television drama BeTipul (In Treatment), which delves into the daily sessions of a psychotherapist and his patients. Launched in 2005, the series has been remade in numerous countries, including the US, France, Brazil, Russia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Japan, and China.

Levi is the cocreator and coproducer of The Affair (2015), for which he was awarded a Golden Globe. In 2019, he captivated audiences with the provocative Our Boys, a series that explores the real events leading to the kidnapping and murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in Jerusalem. His latest endeavor, Scenes from a Marriage in 2021, is a critically acclaimed remake of Ingmar Bergman's 1973 Swedish miniseries.

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Levi and explore the challenges and opportunities of being a TV creator in an era during which the industry has undergone profound transformations.

Poetics Today: Your career spans several decades, from the period when people still used to watch their favorite show on the networks once a week, all the way to today's VOD [video on demand] and streaming. Your In Treatment is interesting in that regard: it follows the days of the week, with each storyline appearing on a set day, inviting interesting variations on the traditional, weekly watching. Did you have the changes in the industry, with its new temporalities, in mind when creating the show?

Hagai Levi: When I started working on In Treatment, there was already cable TV, but no VOD system. Programming was still linear. I used to work, the years before, for daily series in Israel. Daily series are very common in some countries, say the South American telenovelas, or the British soaps. In Israel this format was entirely new and I was approached by some producer to work on the two first telenovelas produced ever in Israel. It was the first time for me to meet daily programming, and I found it to be very powerful in a way. I always tell the story that when I called my sister one evening she said, I cannot speak right now because we're watching your show at 7 o'clock. I realized then how deeply these shows get into people's daily routine. So the idea of doing In Treatment as a daily show came from that. Plus, of course, it was inexpensive. It had the efficiency of shooting one episode per day, working with very low budgets.

I started working on In Treatment in 2002, and when it aired—and we're jumping now to the end of 2005—it actually launched the VOD system in Israel. It was a perfect showcase to demonstrate how you can use VOD.

So yes, In Treatment was in between eras, in the sense that now you could watch every single storyline by itself rather than watch the episodes in a linear fashion. When we sold it in DVD, you could buy the whole box, but you could also buy separate discs of every storyline. You could watch it both ways. To be honest, if you'd like to experience the series, you'd have to watch it all, day by day, because the stories are connected to each other, and you'd miss a lot if you'd watch separate storylines.

PT: And in your more recent work, now deep into the age of streaming, like Scenes from a Marriage, are you very conscious of the fact that people may be watching this, not as it drops week by week, but on a binge?

HL: I'm trying not to be. I think Scenes from a Marriage is a good example, because when people ask me, I always tell them, don't binge it because it's heavy stuff. If you binge it, it's just too much. I wouldn't say that I created something differently because streaming exists. You have to remember also that HBO is one of the only places left where shows still air weekly and they don't put the episodes in VOD just after they finish airing. So after the first week, you have only the first episode available.

There is this popular mechanism in today's series of cliff-hangers, which force you to keep watching the next episode. This works very much like drugs in the sense that at the end of the night, when you have watched, like, five or seven episodes, you feel kind of abused. You feel that you couldn't stop watching if you tried. And sometimes it's done in a very cheesy way—you cut in the middle of a chase, in the middle of a fight, and then what can you do? You just have to keep watching. Usually this is not the kind of series that I choose to make.

When it comes to commercial series, which are 95 percent of the market, I guess they even have a kind of algorithm that tells creators how to end an episode in a way that people would have to come back to it. But I actually don't think this is a fundamental change. Even back in the days of the weekly series, you had to do something for people to come back to your show. And it was even harder back then: you had to get the audience to come back a whole week later. So you had all these tricks. “Who shot JR?” was the end of the season. You had to keep people waiting for a whole year.

So, in the sense of cliff-hangers, I don't feel that I tell the story differently at the age of streaming. One difference, however, is the importance today of the first episode. This is the Holy Grail: your main concern is how you can bring back the audience after the first episode. The most important phenomenon today is not the binging or the streaming—it's that you have endless content, and the competition is fierce. What creators need to cope with today is how to stand out, especially with the first episode; if the viewers come back for the second episode, then you got them, right? So what changed are the first episodes. First episodes used to be more expositional and more laid back, but now you can't afford it.

PT: With the cliff-hangers, there's a link between TV and the nineteenth-century novel that was published serially, and every “dropping” of three-chapter units included the same kind of cliff-hangers that you talked about. Another practice that developed at that time was the engaged reader, who gave feedback to authors about where the plot should go next. Does the feedback from viewers matter in the age of streaming more than it did earlier? Is that a factor in your vision?

HL: Since In Treatment, everything I made was a miniseries. I didn't make subsequent seasons. Even with In Treatment, I only made a second season and that was it. So the experience of getting feedback about the first season and then changing it is not very familiar to me. Except, for instance, when people said that after the first season of Treatment that all the characters are privileged Ashkenazim, so I tried to put in the second season a character who wasn't Ashkenazi.

PT: What about the series Our Boys, which was based on actual political events and narratives that viewers were very much familiar with? Did that change the way you wrote about these events? Were you aware of the potential controversy around the material?

HL: Well, Our Boys is a very specific case. We started working on it just one year after the events it tells happened.

I always need rules. On whatever project I work, I begin by setting the rules. For example, it's in one room and continuous time, no cuts like in In Treatment; or, it's all in one house, like in Scenes from a Marriage.

So with Our Boys I had to make rules concerning how and what we can change about the real events. I think my main rule was, if I change something and someone would come and say, that didn't happen that way, and I could say back, well, does it fundamentally change the whole thing? If the answer is no, then I'm OK with it. Does it matter if an event happened on Sunday or Monday? Probably not. Then if it helps me dramatically, I'll go with Monday. This puts a lot of responsibility on the creators, because we decide if an element is important or not.

Another thing we did, which was on the verge of the ethical, is combining documentary footage with a footage we created. We put our characters inside the documentary sequences. So there are huge riots in Jerusalem, let's say. And our characters are there in postproduction effects. To do that—it's a big deal. For me what was important was, again, that the characters could have been there, considering their characteristics and the chain of events. So they are there. This is, I guess, why with all the debates around this series, not many people said that it wasn't true to facts. So I guess we succeeded in that.

PT: Let's talk about international impact. One of the things that is striking about In Treatment is how it was remade in around twenty different cultures with different actors and languages, rather than just subtitled or dubbed. How was that decision made and what are the changes that had to happen as the series moved from culture to culture?

HL: I have to say, first of all, that I didn't do anything for that to happen. It just happened. I just started to get phone calls. This phenomenon has never happened before in Israel, and rarely in other places. So it was a nice surprise.

And it happened before the streaming era. Nowadays, there are fewer adaptations because you can watch a Turkish series in its own language, right? And this, I think, is a great achievement of Netflix and other streamers, that people learned to watch shows with subtitles. Especially Americans. For them, it just wasn't an option before. Most of the adaptations were okay, and the viewers wanted to hear English. But today, I think there are fewer adaptations because of the streamers. So, many Israeli shows, Swedish shows, Turkish shows are broadcast in their own language, something that is so important culturally—I mean, it makes you a better person, right? If you're exposed to other cultures, other languages, your xenophobia melts down. And that wasn't yet the case when In Treatment came out. I am still very happy whenever someone tells me, “I watched the original Hebrew version.”

PT: But then so many adaptations were made. Do you think there was something about that series’ structure that made it adaptable?

HL: It's the structure, but there are also some other reasons for that. First of all, it's the cheapest production ever! So even small countries could afford to remake it. All of the budget is on the writing and on the actors, nothing else.

It also attracts stars everywhere. The therapist in Serbia, for example, was played by a big Serbian star. It's the closest to theater you have in television and this is what stars like. Think about actors in action drama: they do one line and then they go to sleep for half a day, you know. But with In Treatment they act all day and it's all about them. All you see is their faces. It's their dream role.

In several cases, the show helped to launch new channels, because you could get attention through it, through the stars, and by the fact that it's considered highbrow.

It's also a very, very catchy format. You can sell or buy it with one sentence. It's that simple. You tell the idea in one sentence and then people say, huh, right, why not? That's rare in TV culture.

The interesting thing is that adaptations were made in places where therapy was not popular at all, like in Eastern Europe. People actually sometimes used it to raise awareness of the idea of therapy, like in Russia. Many of the places where it was adapted are places where therapy is not very popular. Now, for instance, the rights were bought in the UAE [United Arab Emirates].

PT: And did you have to tweak it and do variations to accommodate the cultural differences around therapy?

HL: Yeah, absolutely. One of the storylines was originally about an Israeli combat pilot, bombing in Gaza. That was the storyline that you had to change everywhere. So in the beginning the various productions saw it as a problem, but it became an opportunity actually to make the show local. In each case this storyline became one of the anchors for the locality of the show. In the Israeli version, this story also included the pilot's father—a Holocaust survivor. So there are two layers of trauma that adaptations had to cope with. In the best adaptations, they used a real current burning issue, a real local trauma. The French adaptation was one of the most successful. In their version, the whole series begins two days after the Bataclan terror attack. So in a way, the whole country is in trauma and you're doing a therapy show. Plus, that character in this case was a police officer who was inside the Bataclan during the attack—but he was a Muslim. So that's how they connected to local trauma and it worked amazingly. In America they turned the character into a guy who bombed in Iraq. In this case he was also Black, so that created another layer of trauma, going back to the fifties and segregation.

Another thing that the adaptations had to deal with was the local school of therapy. In each country therapy is a bit different. And you had to adjust therapy to fit the culture. In Romania, for instance, there was one of the most interesting adaptations. Ceausescu banned the School of Psychotherapy [in the early eighties]. He related it to free thinking. After his era they had to kind of rebuild psychotherapy from scratch. In Romania and in other East European places, the idea that you can come to a stranger and talk about yourself is a dangerous idea because who knows who is listening, right?

In Poland, for instance, I remember they said that therapy was kind of a substitution for the Catholic Church in a way. So you see this guy, for instance, who in this version became an army officer who fought in Afghanistan, comes to the therapist and says, I can get the same thing in confession for free, you know!

PT: Finally, what would you say is the main difference between TV today and that of a generation ago?

HL: The main difference is that you almost don't see drama series today. You see instead many genre series. I would say that 95 percent of what you see is either thriller, horror, or comedies. We spoke about the television of twenty years ago; when HBO started, it was all drama. Now it's hard to find drama; it's hard to sell drama.

Competition in business can be great, but in television it's destructive. People need to admit that what they call the Golden Age of television, was when HBO was almost alone. Then they could do anything, and people had to watch because they didn't have many options. That's how you could have The Wire, where you needed to watch a whole series, not one episode, but the entire series, just to understand what's going on. Now it's not the case anymore. Now you have hundreds of competing shows and this creates a completely different atmosphere. You need to have much more sex, violence, nudity, and genre elements from the very beginning. That, for me, is the true meaning of the new, streaming reality.