https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0TNSFR0EEK92QB9GUIJXFHVLOZ

I can’t even find a YouTube trailer, not one in English anyway.

There is no heavy lifting here, this series is on Prime Video, and everybody has Amazon Prime (don’t e-mail me if you don’t, keep making those calls on your flip phone/dumbphone).

Owen Sloane e-mailed me about it. And I rarely hear from him, and I don’t remember him ever recommending a series, and that’s whose advice I respect most, not those who inundate me with the clickbait, low-hanging fruit shows. I like to go deeper, I look for full satisfaction.

But I’d never heard of “The German.”

And it wasn’t that easy to find on Amazon Prime Video either. A lot of other stuff comes up with a similar title.

Now this is an Israeli series. Kind of funny to be recommending it in the era of Free Palestine, but as I repeat ad infinitum, the Israelis and the Danes make the best television. Furthermore, “The German” is set in 1970, before today’s Gaza crisis.

So what we’ve got here is international business, espionage, kibbutz life… For a few episodes you won’t really know what is going on. Or you’ll think you know what is going on and…

I haven’t been to a kibbutz since 1972, but I was stunned to find the one in this series aligned with my memories completely.

You see a kibbutz in that era, before most of them went extinct, was very informal. Actually, in that era, Israel itself was informal. One, because it was so damn hot. Two, because the focus was not on image, but basic life. Trappings were irrelevant. Especially interesting in today’s world where it’s all about the trappings, boasting, especially online, how you’re better than everybody else.

On the kibbutz everybody is equal. Sort of. And no one has any real money, everything is communal. You even have to borrow a car.

But the life?

At one point a young woman talks about all the sex everybody is having. Interesting, when you have a limited number of people in a society they’re more honest, they get even closer.

But back to sartorial issues… Everybody in the kibbutz is wearing shorts. This is what I remember. Practicality was key, what was in your head was paramount.

And there’s a giant swimming pool… And not only did I consider the depiction of the kibbutz accurate, the reviews I read after we completed the series went on about this.

Not that everything is hunky-dory.

And if the kibbutz is paying for your college education, can you leave it?

And irrelevant of your intellect and qualifications, there’s a lot of manual labor involved.

So…

This is a concentration camp show.

This is a Nazi show.

But not in the conventional manner. You see many people in the kibbutz are survivors of the Holocaust, they’ve got numbers tattooed on their forearms and…

They’ve soldiered on when so many of their families and relatives did not make it. How do you do this?

You never forget, your sleep may be tainted decades later, but you don’t tell your kids, you don’t want to tarnish their lives, bring them down.

So we’ve got stories of survivors.

And the documentation of the dead at Yad Vashem.

And this may sound pedantic and dry, yet it’s anything but. What makes “The German” so great is the humanity, the three-dimensional figures and how they act and cope. The plot is just laid on top of them. AND OH WHAT A PLOT IT IS!

Nothing I’ve said above gives anything away, but I’m going to stop there, because…

Let’s just say you’ll be riveted, you’ll be emotionally involved, at times you’ll be on the edge of your seat.

How the Israelis do it, I do not know. How they get story so believable and the images right… In the U.S., we focus on image first, believability second, if at all, after all fantasy/science fiction/superheroes triumph over here.

We finished “The German” in two days. I defy you to sit through all eight episodes (none an hour long, this is not a slog) and say this wasn’t a great show.

This is real television, this is what we are looking for. You can get this plot in a movie, but not this depth.

WATCH IT!

P.S. You have to pay $4.99 a month for Prime Video Ultra to get rid of commercials. I always watch a while, see if I’m going to complete the series, before signing up for this. And after I do, I immediately cancel it, so I get my thirty days and am not charged again. And when I went to do this yesterday… Forget how hard it was to find the right page, but when I clicked to cancel Prime Video Ultra, the option that came up was to cancel Prime entirely. Believe me, I tried it multiple times, there’s a glitch in the system. And after wasting all that time, I decided to contact Amazon… But good luck with that. I’m looking for the chat option AND I JUST CANNOT FIND IT! Eventually I do, and I get Mohammed who takes care of my problem. But I’m pissed off. I wasted all this time for $4.99? Was it worth it? This is exactly what they want to have happen, to get you to sign up and never sign off. There was a Click-To-Cancel rule established by the Lina Khan led FTC during the prior administration, but Trump killed it…got to let the lobbyists win!

Trump’s FTC Let Lobbyists Kill Popular Click-To-Cancel Rule, Advocates Say