If you live in Israel right now, you are probably watching Happy Place (Makom Sameach).

The show follows Vered (played by Noa Koler), a speech therapist in the throes of a midlife crisis, who is trying to “save” her depressed, aging mother, Nomi (Tiki Dayan), by dragging her to a positive-thinking “happiness workshop.”

I don’t want to give it a rave review. There are enough of those. I want to talk about how, for the first time since living here in Israel, I finally saw a character I could relate to. As an immigrant, I usually feel “other” compared to Israeli women. They seem to possess a code I haven’t cracked. But Vered? With her neuroticism, her messy boundaries, and her desperate need to make things okay? I think we could be great friends.

The show is funny, painful, and deeply uncomfortable, mostly because it refuses to lie to us.

There is a scene that stopped me cold. Vered and her mother are arguing in the car, and Nomi starts picking at the seams of Vered’s marriage. She dismisses Vered’s husband as “emotionally challenged.” Vered immediately gets defensive, spiraling into a desperate attempt to prove that he is a good man and that her life is happy. And then, Nomi shuts her down with........

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