Unorthodox

Maria Schrader's Unorthodox launched on Netflix in March 2020 and became the platform's most internationally discussed German-language production to date. The four-part miniseries was loosely based on Deborah Feldman's 2012 memoir of leaving the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, with Anna Winger (the showrunner) and Daniel Hendler adapting. Schrader won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series; Shira Haas was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress.

Esther Esty Shapiro (Haas, in a star-launching performance) flees her arranged Williamsburg marriage to Yanky (Amit Rahav) and travels to Berlin, where she had been told her estranged mother now lives. The series moves between her gradual integration into a music-conservatory cohort of secular European peers (the German cellist, the Israeli kibbutznik, the Yemeni-Israeli oboist) and flashbacks to the religious community she left. Yanky and his cousin Moishe (Jeff Wilbusch, an Israeli actor whose own complicated relationship with Hasidic Judaism informs the role) follow her to Berlin in an attempt to bring her back.

The series is notable for the linguistic care it took with Yiddish (most of the Williamsburg dialogue is performed in Yiddish, with Israeli, Russian-Jewish and German actors coached to ultra-Orthodox accents) and for the quiet attention it pays to the female religious experience that is too often dismissed as monolithic.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most internationally significant German-language miniseries of the streaming era, and the rare drama that takes religious community seriously without either flattening or sensationalising it. Haas's central performance is irreplaceable.