Stream It Or Skip It?

If you’re at all familiar with Israeli television, you’ve probably seen Lior Raz and Rotem Sela before. Raz is probably better known in the States than Sela, having starred in the Netflix hit Fauda and having been featured in films like Gladiator II. Apparently, the two of them are close friends, and they have decided that the way to celebrate that friendship is to go off-roading in Central Asia.

OFF ROAD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In a scene from the first season, actors Rotem Sela and Lior Raz are driving an SUV through some desert terrain. Sela dabs at her eyes, and Raz asks if she’s crying. “It’ll pass,” she says.

The Gist: Sela and Raz are popular Israeli actors who became fast friends when they started in a series together three years prior to this road trip. Their relationship is strictly platonic, but they have become very close in the interim; they seem to challenge each other like no one else does, including their respective spouses.

In the six-part series Off Road, the pair go on a road trip through Kyrgyzstan And Kazakhstan, much of it off the beaten path. As they tell a counselor before the trip, Raz wants to go because he wants to scratch the itch for adventure and travel that he’s had for years. Sela wants to go to find a sense of peace in her life, given her busy career and three kids. Raz is convinced, though, that Sela isn’t going to be able to handle some of the inconveniences and rough terrain they’ll encounter.

The trip is 25 days, with the pair stopping at a different place every day. After flying into Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, they drive off to a location where the traditional game of kok boru is played; Raz describes it as “football on horses.” On the way, though, they get stuck in some deep, muddy ruts in the “road”. While Raz tries to find solutions to help him get out, Sela jokes to the camera that it’s the end of the episode. They stay in luxury yurts for the night, where the vegetarians are served horse sausages and yak meat.

On the second day, the two argue like an old married couple as they make their way to a guest house owned by a farming family, and enjoy the dinner they serve. They finally get to the kok boru field the next day, and Sela is horrified to see that the “ball” is a sheep that is slaughtered right before the game starts.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Off Road reminds us of another celebrity road trip docuseries: Ewan McGregor’s Long Way Round and its sequels.

Our Take: Off Road gives viewers a strange dynamic and tries to put it in the context of a beautifully-shot travel series. The dynamic is that the two people who are traveling together are opposite-sex buddies who have only known each other for a few years, talk in romantic ways about each other, but are both married and seem to have no intention of taking things further.

In macro, it presents the age-old question of if men and women can be “just friends.” But instead of a When Harry Met Sally romcom where they eventually do become more than friends, Sela and Raz are bouncing around rough terrain in an orange SUV and watching a dead sheep being tossed around by men on horses. And there’s no chance the two of them will connect at the end.

When things get tense between the two of them, which seems to happen from almost the moment they hit the road, the dynamic shifts from friends to a squabbling couple, where it seems that the two of them can say all manner of hurtful things to each other. Remember, these two have only known each other for three years. It makes us wonder just how intense this friendship was during that time, where they feel comfortable traveling together without their spouses, in two Central Asian countries where they may speak English but definitely don’t speak Hebrew, and with cameras constantly in their faces.

Like most travel shows of this ilk, the people of the various locales who so generously open their homes to the actors and the crew, and show them their traditions, are treated more as background scenery than anything else, as we’ll explain below.

As the trip goes on and the pair’s emotions are rubbed raw in front of the cameras and each other, it’ll be interesting if the dynamic between Sela and Raz still feels as strange as it did during the first episode or if they settle into a rhythm that feels more like buddies and less like they should leave their spouses and give it a go as a couple.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As she tries not to watch the kok boru match, we hear Sela on the phone with the Central Asian expert hired to help the pair. She’s saying that she’s failing at emptying her head of all the business of life back in Israel; instead, her head is filling with things like sheep being slaughtered literally for sport.

Sleeper Star: As usual in shows like these, the director of photography and camera crews do a great job at getting spectacular footage of the countryside of Kyrgyzstan.

Most Pilot-y Line: At dinner the first night, Sela has no problem telling the host that she’s a vegetarian after he presents the pair with an already-prepared charcuterie board of horse and yak meat. Then Raz chimes in and says that he is also a vegetarian, albeit a recent one. Then they speak to each other in Hebrew in front of the host. Holy hell, we thought American tourists were privileged and rude…

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re not sure if the dynamic between Rotem Sela and Lior Raz on Off Road is off-putting or completely fascinating. It’s probably both, and that combined with the amazing Central Asian scenery means that we’ll keep watching.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.