Writer and creator Ron Leshem, who received an Oscar nomination for “Beaufort” and co-created the original Israeli series that inspired Sam Levinson’s “Euphoria,” the second most-watched series in HBO history, ranks as one of the most high-profile standard-bearers of the local-to-global push that has been a key part of some of the most moving television produced in the past two decades.
So there’s one big question. With global streaming services focusing on regional locals and TV operators around the world playing it safer, what happens now to Leshem?
The short answer is that Leshem is “excited,” he told Variety ahead of the Cannes series Masterclass. “There are many reasons why this is a golden age for global drama, and there are many reasons why independent films can save TV dramas just as they have saved movies so many times,” he enthuses with typical passion.
Leshem serves by example. He said he has “never been more excited” about a project since the first season of “Euphoria” and since his Academy Award win for “Beaufort” than with “Paranoia,” which is in production in Brazil with Globoplay and Janeiro Studios.
Although he is based in Los Angeles in partnership with CAA, his label Crossing Oceans produces primarily around the world. Working with longtime co-writers Amit Cohen and Daniel Amsel, Crossing Oceans is now slated for series in Australia, beyond Paranoia. “Pegasus”, co-produced in Europe. Additional seasons of the French TV series “Révolution,” produced in collaboration with Iranian filmmakers, and “Bad Boy,” also remade in the United States.
“World drama is perceived as a low-budget solution, an even more exotic niche, and a Hollywood research and development lab,” Leshem reflected to Variety just before the Cannes series. “But the power of global drama is not just that it stays on budget (in many countries, you can sometimes produce six seasons of a high-end drama for the price of one US episode). But more importantly, it opens the door to new settings, new worlds, journeys, new energy. It can reinvent the screen. Dare. Surprise.” he added.
That doesn’t mean losing your audience, Leshem insists.
“We need to tell the ‘edgy mainstream’ – sharp, bold, risky, boundary-pushing stories that appeal to the masses, made to feel like events. The next mainstream won’t come from a safe bet. We need to act as a community of writers and producers. It’s my personal mission to support world-class writers in this space and help increase the sense of global community among drama producers.”
“Amit and I divide our time between projects where we write every word ourselves and, more recently, projects that span four continents,” says Reshem.
“These are projects that we develop with deep creative involvement with local creators,” he adds.
A good example is “paranoia.” When it was announced at Mipcon in October, the film was described as “screening unknown characters from all over Brazil, giving them never-before-seen exposure in modern, vibrant Rio de Janeiro.”
“Working with the Globoplay theater team in Brazil was the most stimulating, intelligent and truly heartwarming creative dialogue of my life,” said Leshem. “And when I first walked into their studio in Rio, I felt like it was a facility that was better than anything in Hollywood, not just technically, but also in terms of the work culture and the human atmosphere.”
Leshem came to Cannes with tips on how to attract global partners. “Generally, I say this: Every show today has to be exciting,” he told Variety. “There are four elements, and for it to break through and become an event, at least two have to feel truly new. That’s a world we’ve never seen before on television, a voice or protagonist who travels like we’ve never seen before, a cross-genre that hasn’t been serialized, or a cinematic language that invents something. And that means we have to be bold and take risks.”
“Euphoria” and its journey
He has worked as a journalist in Israel since 1998 and was promoted to deputy editor and head of news at Marib in 2001. In 2005, he moved to television and worked in content development for Keshet Broadcasting, where he became the network’s head of content and programming and was responsible for developing shows such as “False Flag” and “Prisoners of War.” The latter was adapted in the US as “Homeland”
But as a writer, “I felt like I couldn’t write a single word until ‘Euphoria’ was cracked. Partly inspired by ‘Skins,’ it was a portrait of Israel’s new youth. Amit Cohen and Leshem wrote on a whiteboard: ’17 is the new 25, but 40 is the new 25. We’re stuck.'” It’s a story about a 25-year-old, but when you apply it to the body of a high school student, it’s childish and disturbing. We wrote this: “Sex is easier than kissing,” “Wishing is stronger than achieving, and seeking is more thrilling than finding.” “Heroes who live everywhere but reality. Reality has been exhausted. They seek euphoria through drugs, screens, pornography and fantasy, seeking purpose in a sea of nothingness. A generation that feels everything and struggles to contain it.”
Euphoria, set in 2012 and written with Daniel Amsel and Daphna Levin, “didn’t try to be realistic. It was just a fractured fantasy about the poison of freedom, love as an answer to meaninglessness, and emotional truths about how the trauma of youth shapes an entire life,” Leshem recalls.
However, when it was announced, Leshem was deeply dissatisfied with the outcome. “For the price of one episode of American drama, you can produce seven seasons and 60 episodes of high-end drama. That’s a big price to pay. Sometimes we have to settle for less than 20 scenes per episode, not at a pace that would indicate a lack of attention at the time.”
“The HBO version has as many as 100 scenes in some episodes. We shot some magic realism scenes, but with what little money we had, it was a stretch, so we threw them on the editing room floor.”
When the original “Euphoria” aired on Israel’s HOT in 2012, “we felt misunderstood. Budget constraints prevented us from realizing most of our visions and ideas,” Leshem told Variety.
So Leshem and Hadas Lichenstein spent six years “knocking on every door in Los Angeles” and revisiting all 20 networks that aired “Euphoria” to analytically explain why the show was never produced.
“Unlike movies, the golden rule of television was that if the main characters were teenagers, it would necessarily be a coming-of-age drama, and it wouldn’t attract an audience of adults, let alone people in their 20s. Our friends who made Stranger Things had the same experience. Twenty networks also aired it, for that very reason,” Leshem remembers.
But while Hadas Lichtenstein and Leshem were presenting the American series, young people’s experiences were changing in the background.
Finally, Leshem met with Casey Bloys and Franska Orsi and proposed “Euphoria” to Sam Levinson. “Sam is a truly rare genius, one who commands a crew of 600 people like a true leader, yet remains a solitary artist, a painter and a composer in his soul,” says Leshem.
“Mr. Franny asked him to weave in his own personal scars from when he was a teenager. Mr. Lou’s addiction began with his father’s painkillers as he was dying of cancer. The opioid epidemic, which has claimed 800,000 victims in the United States and sometimes dozens of children in the same communities, felt like a burning scar, yet unhealed ground.”
With Levinson on board as showrunner, Leshem, who received a writing credit on the pilot episode, is freed up to focus on the new show, which he has worked on with extraordinary energy.
Leshem’s life journey
Based in the United States since 2013, Reshem’s life journey has been lived with passion and, at times, deep regret. Leshem and Cohen first met as members of the Israeli military’s elite intelligence unit 8200.
“I was the head of the intelligence unit (overseeing) the Palestinian peace negotiations. We were aware that so many great powers on both sides were trying to sabotage the peace negotiations,” Leshem recalled.
“When all my hopes were dashed, I was already a journalist and spent every night looking at pictures of dead bodies. I felt like I was carrying this tragedy on my shoulders, breathing in all the names of all the victims and murdered children.”
Leshem’s wartime experiences inspired “Beaufort” and “Valley of Tears” and the emotional throughline of his entire career: the need for empathy for “the other.”
In “Valley of Tears,” which won the series Mani’s 2020 Top Grand Prix, a young Israeli intelligence officer, Abinoam Shapira, encounters a wounded Syrian man who is believed to be his enemy. He starts talking to him and discovers they have something in common. One of Shapira’s fellow soldiers then appeared and shot and killed the Syrian.
The Hulu/Arte series No Man’s Land, which was a standout in the same main contest at Series Mania in 2020, features Antoine, a construction engineer wracked with guilt over the death of his sister in a terrorist attack, who believes he sees her in television footage from the Kurdish YPG militia.
Minutes into the series, he crosses the border from Turkey into Syria and arrives in an unusual world, if highly grounded and factual, where he transforms, finds a sense of belonging, and fights alongside YPG female soldiers.
“No Man’s Land”
Cifedine Elamine
The bulk of Bad Boy, nominated for an International Emmy Award in 2025, focuses on Dean (Guy Menastar), a teenager who spends most of his teenage years in a juvenile detention center for drug trafficking. It’s not the kind of youth that most viewers of this series can immediately relate to.
“Similar to ‘Euphoria,’ I was really drawn to exploring the impact of trauma and childhood mistakes on a person’s trajectory and ability to heal and conquer their own destiny,” Leshem told Variety.
“But what has changed for me since ‘Euphoria’ is that I believe that the human ability to feel sympathy and empathy for those who are different from us is disappearing, that it is an epidemic, and that theater is the only means of fighting that I know and that we can change the world,” he added.
“With all due respect to ‘local for local,’ we need deeper and earlier collaborations from scripting to packaging to production, rather than just hoping the story gets out there,” Leshem told Variety just before the Cannes series.
“It is also right to create together as a global theater community, especially as the world spins out of control and moves away from globalization and empathy.”
Expect more Crossing Oceans series announcements soon.
“Bad Boy”
Courtesy of Shipur
