What to watch this week: Jon Hamm's new thriller, TV's latest Kristallnacht mystery
TV TIME: A forgotten Jewish refugee whose actions preceded Kristallnacht, Jon Hamm's gripping new hostage drama, and a Netflix thriller that struggles to match The White Lotus.
An expanded version of the documentary Proud Jewish Boy , which tells one of the strangest, most twist-filled mysteries of World War II, will be showing on KAN 11 in two parts, on November 7 and November 9, roughly coinciding with the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the pogrom that can be seen as the beginning of the Holocaust, an event that is at the center of the film.
The movie , which won the Best Israeli Documentary Award at the Haifa International Film Festival last year, tells the story of Herschel Grynszpan, a name that is almost forgotten today. He was a 17-year-old Jewish refugee who assassinated a German diplomat in Paris in 1938, an act the Nazis cynically used as a pretext for Kristallnacht. Grynszpan was arrested, but in most accounts, that's where the story ends.
Proud Jewish Boy , Isri Halpern's meticulously researched and fascinating documentary, sets out to find the truth about the crime Grynszpan committed and its aftermath.
He was born in 1921 in Hanover to Polish Jewish parents who had lived in Germany for decades but were never granted citizenship. Like tens of thousands of Jews classified as "Polish nationals," the family existed in a legal limbo that became deadly once the Nazis came to power.
In October 1938, the German government abruptly expelled more than 17,000 Polish Jews, dumping them at the Polish border. Grynszpan's parents were among them, stranded in appalling conditions in the border town of Zbaszyn.
Seventeen years old, stateless, living illegally in Paris, Grynszpan walked into the German Embassy, asked to see an official, and shot Ernst vom Rath, a minor diplomat, who died two days later. Grynszpan did not fight as he was arrested.His act was framed as proof of an international Jewish conspiracy, even as he sat alone in a French prison.
When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Grynszpan was transferred into German custody.
The regime initially planned a spectacular show trial that would place him at the center of its antisemitic mythology. But according to documents unearthed years later, Grynszpan likely told German interrogators he and his victim had had a sexual relationship, which would have embarrassed the Nazi regime in a public trial.
Grynszpan disappeared into the Nazi prison system, and no one knows for sure what happened to him, although, as the documentary details, there are many theories. As Halpern told me in an interview, "We don't know exactly how he died. But we know why people stopped asking."
Since there were few photographs of Grynszpan, Halpern commissioned striking drawings by the acclaimed artists David Polonsky and Michael Faust, best known for their work on Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir and Gidi Dar's Legend of Destruction .
'Proud Jewish Boy' explores the mystery behind the canceled Nazi show trial
The two-part version of the documentary will go into more detail about certain key events, particularly the cancellation of the show trial. Those interested in the history of this period will want to see both episodes.
Jon Hamm delivers his best performance since 'Mad Men' in 'American Hostage'
The series American Hostage , all eight episodes of which just began running on YesVOD, gives Jon Hamm , best known for his performance as the charismatic, womanizing advertising executive on Mad Men , his best role since that earlier series ended.
It is based on a true story that took place in Indianapolis in 1977, and Hamm plays Fred Heckman, the news director and a popular broadcaster on a radio station who is known and loved for his folksy My Town Indy program .
Hamm's Don Draper character from Mad Men sometimes passed himself off as a straitlaced all-American family man, but Heckman really is this kind of guy, and Hamm gives a great performance, one that gets you rooting for the character from the beginning.
The story kicks off when an unhinged man, Tony Kiritsis (Giovanni Ribisi), goes into the office of a mortgage bank, concealing a sawed-off shotgun, and takes the bank's mortgage officer Dick Hall (Kristoffer Polaha) hostage, after attaching a wire from the gun to the back of Hall's head and to himself, creating a "dead man's line." If SWAT teams manage to take out Kiritsis, Hall will die, too.
During the 63-hour hostage crisis, Kiritsis asked to speak live on the air to Heckman, whom he saw as trustworthy, which put the radio broadcaster in the middle of the hostage drama.
The eight-part miniseries raises questions about what happens when the media gets involved in a story, and about how Heckman should handle this incredibly risky situation.
This incident has already inspired a documentary called Dead Man's Line ; a 2022 scripted podcast also called American Hostage , which featured Hamm in reenactments; and the 2025 film Dead Man's Wire , directed by Gus Van Sant.
The series was co-created by Shawn Ryan ( The Shield, Terriers ) and Eileen Myers ( Masters of Sex, Big Love ), and it features a loving recreation of a 1970s newsroom, which may remind you, in moments, of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the Lou Grant series.
Adam Arkin, the great character actor who is Alan Arkin's son, co-directed the series and plays a defense attorney who takes part in the negotiations.
The supporting cast also features Mireille Enos, who was so good in The Killing
and Big Love
, as Heckman's wife.
Hamm really holds the screen here, although Ribisi has the showier role as an intermittently sympathetic everyman who finally snaps.
Following Mad Men , which turned Hamm into an international sex symbol, he gravitated toward comic roles, like in the Mean Girls remake and Confess, Fletch.
He was also good as the disgraced executive on the TV series Your Friends and Neighbors , who discovers that, at least briefly, crime does pay, a series available on Apple TV+. But American Hostage really gives him the kind of major role we've been waiting to see him play.
Netflix's "A Couple of Lies' attempts to recreate 'The White Lotus' formula
Season four of The White Lotus is set to be released in early 2027, but while you're waiting, you might want to watch a new Netflix series, A Couple of Lies, that tries to capture the formula of gorgeous people vacationing in gorgeous locations, with a foreshadowed mysterious death driving the plot.
All three seasons of The White Lotus have been compulsively watchable, but it turns out that the formula isn't as easy to copy as it seems.
A Couple of Lies features two couples who swap houses.
One is a Swedish-British couple (Jakob Oftebro and Emma Appleton) who live in a slightly run-down but beautiful old home in Sicily with a pool and beachfront access.
They go on vacation to an even more breathtaking home on a pristine island near Stockholm, which belongs to a workaholic hotel magnate struggling to recover from alcoholism (Fares Fares) and his pregnant wife (Frida Gustavsson), who wants him to relax and enjoy their last vacation before she gives birth.
Sicilian police are searching for a tourist who vanished near the home in Sicily not long ago, while a creepy neighbor in the house near Stockholm seems to be spying on the other couple. There are strange noises, security cameras that can't be turned off, and a couple of really disgusting surprises.
It sounds like it checks all the boxes, right? But in The White Lotus
, I never guessed the victim's identity correctly in any of the seasons, no matter how hard I tried, and here I figured out every twist and turn about halfway into the second episode.
The producers are probably hoping you will be seduced by the sexy cast and lovely locations into not minding the predictability.
If you would like a series about rich, beautiful people that's more original, you might want to check out Love Story on Disney+, a series that dramatizes the relationship between Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr., who were married for a few years before they died in the crash of a plane he was piloting in 1999.
It's not the same vibe as The White Lotus , but there are similarities, and it's incredibly well done.
