Zaguri

Zaguri Imperia (, lit. Zaguri Empire) is an Israeli mystery comedy-drama, created by Maor Zaguri and produced by HOT Telecommunication Systems. The first season was broadcast on the cable channel HOT3 between April 8 to June 4, 2014. The second opened on 3 February 2015 and ended on 1 April 2015. The series was both one of the most expensive and most successful to ever air on Israeli television. Plot The series opens with a flashforward of Aviel Zaguri, his face spattered with blood, telling a police officer that he has killed his father. He mutters that none can escape the hand of prophecy, and that he is Oedipus. Eight years previously, Aviel was sent from his home in Beersheba to a boarding school, where he strove to shed his traditional Moroccan-Jewish heritage, adopting the norms and culture of his middle-class, Eastern European-descended Ashkenazi peers and even dropping his surname in favour of the more all-Israeli sounding "Gur". He is now a promising career officer in the IDF's Artillery Corps, holding the rank of a captain. Aviel is torn away from his military environment when urgently called back home, which he has barely visited since his departure, to the deathbed of his Grandfather Pinto. Decades ago, the latter owned the South's most prosperous falafel stand; his adopted son Albert ("Beber") married his biological daughter Vivienne in spite of his severe opposition, and gradually drove Pinto out of business. Both severed all ties between them. Aviel is the only family member who reestablished contact with the old man, who made Aviel swear that someday he would reopen the stand and return it to its former glory, but he has forgotten his oath. Aviel grudgingly brings with him his Ashkenazi girlfriend Shahar, a fellow officer, who is baffled by his stereotypical Algerian family, the members of which hold a dim view of the ethnic gap in Israel – Beber refuses to honor the moment of silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day, mockingly stating "I will stand when they teach about my 'shtetl' in Algeria!" – and instantly dub Shahar "mayonnaise" referring to her pale complexion. Aviel confronts the provincial, superstitious-religious, and poverty-stricken world he believed he left behind: his estranged, miserly, eccentric father and his entire family of nine residing in a cramped apartment. His mother, Vivienne, is a superstitious diabetic who has a complex relationship with her own mother, Alegria.