Make A Big Salad And Settle In For Prisoners Of War

What Is This Show? Prisoners Of War.

Where Can I Watch It? Hulu.

Where Is It From? Israel.

What’s It About? After seventeen years of captivity and torture in Syria, Israeli soldiers Nimrod (Yoram Toledano) and Uri (Ishai Golan) are returned to their families; Ami (Assi Cohen), a third soldier who was taken hostage with them, died in captivity. Things get kind of knotty from there, as Uri and Nimrod must adjust to their old lives, in the new context of their PTSD, and their loved ones' expectations. Meanwhile, Haim (Gal Zaid), an Israeli intelligence officer and master interrogator, suspects that there's more to Nimrod's and Uri's stories than they will admit. Throughout it all, everyone eats a crazy amount of salad. They have it at every meal. "Even breakfast?" Even breakfast!

So It’s Basically… Homeland. Really: this is the series on which Homeland was based. Elements of both Nimrod's and Uri's home lives have seemingly been turned into the composite character of Brody (Damian Lewis).

And I’ll Like It If… …you enjoy the human drama of Homeland; Prisoners focuses on Uri and Nimrod's uncomfortable re-integration with their families: Nimrod has two children he barely knows, the younger of whom was not even born when he was captured; Uri's fiancée Nurit (Mili Avital) married his brother while Uri was gone.

But I Might Not Like It If… …what you like most about Homeland is the sleeper-agent element; Prisoners gives that much less play.

But I Might Also Not Like It If… …the sight of salad makes you uneasy. Everyone is always eating a salad.

How Would An American Remake Be Most Likely To Ruin It? Here we don't have to speculate! Homeland diverges from Prisoners quite a bit, amping up the lurid elements and basically 24-enizing it. But some key moments were ported over straight from the original: the returned captive (Nimrod, in this case) sleeping in the fetal position on the floor beside his marital bed; the captive(s) developing a Morse Code-ish fingertip-tapping language; a captive (Uri) getting drafted into tutoring his captor's son. Nimrod's terrible daughter (Yael Eitan) is even named Dana here too! Probably the biggest knock on Homeland compared to its original source material, though, is the way it elides the horrors of captivity; Prisoners Of War does not romanticize torture in the least, and for that reason can sometimes be hard to watch, though it feels important that one not look away.