Esty, a 19-year-old Jewish woman, is living unhappily in an arranged marriage among an ultra-Orthodox community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. She runs away to Berlin, where her estranged mother lives, and tries to navigate a secular life, discovering life outside her community and rejecting all of the beliefs she grew up with. Her husband, who learns that she is pregnant, travels to Berlin with his cousin, by order of their rabbi, to try to find her.
The series was inspired by, and is loosely based on, the memoir by Deborah Feldman, who left the Satmar movement, a Hasidic community in New York City. The show has language switching from English to Yiddish to German. The show was written by Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski, directed by Maria Schrader, produced by Karolinski, and filmed in Berlin. The music academy in Unorthodox is based on the Barenboim-Said Akademie. Anna Winger told The Guardian: "There's a real music academy called the Barenboim-Said Akademie where Jews and Muslims play classical music together, like a whole utopia. We were inspired by this idea, as the sort of institution that could only begin in Berlin." Unorthodox is the first Netflix series to be primarily in Yiddish. Feldman approached writers Winger and Karolinski to turn her autobiography into a television series. They took on the project in part because the story meshed with several topics of mutual interest, especially the challenges of being Jewish in Germany. Winger said that the story "has a kind of doubling back on history", portraying a Jewish character who escapes the "confines of her own life" by returning "to the source of her community's trauma". Because Feldman is a public figure, the writers veered from her life in the fictional Berlin sequences, but based the flashbacks on the book. An early hire was actor and Yiddish specialist Eli Rosen, who translated the scripts, coached the actors, helped with cultural details, and played the rabbi. The production team took two research trips to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, touring buildings and meeting with the community of Satmar Jews, where part of the story is set. Cast in Germany, Jeff Wilbusch was unique among the four lead actors in being a native Yiddish speaker from the Satmar community. Filming began in New York, then relocated to Berlin, where the production designer built interior sets at CCC Filmstudios that synced with the Brooklyn exteriors. Berlin locations include Potsdamer Platz, which served as the set for the music academy and surroundings, and the Wannsee lake, where, as referenced in the story, the "Final Solution" was planned at a shoreline villa. For the production and costume designers, the project presented the challenge of creating a period film set in the present day, with the main character gradually transitioning between them. The two-day filming of the wedding was a complex undertaking, involving about a hundred extras that had to accurately depict a nuanced cultural celebration. "The joke on the show was that the men required way more hair and make-up than the women", Winger said. Costume designer Justine Seymour obtained some of the clothes in Williamsburg, but not the costly fur hats, shtreimels, which were made by a Hamburg-based theater company, using fake fur, instead of minks.
Reception
Critical reception
The miniseries received critical acclaim upon its release. The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 95%, based on 41 reviews, with an average rating of 8.09/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Unorthodox adapts its source material with extreme care, crafting a series that is at once intimate and urgent, all centered around Shira Haas' captivating performance." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 85 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Accolades
''Making Unorthodox'' documentary
Netflix released a 20-minute documentary, Making Unorthodox, that chronicles the creative process and filming of the miniseries, and discussed the differences between the and the TV show.
