My Unorthodox Life
Netflix | ★★✩✩✩

With season 2 of My Unorthodox Life just released on Netflix and steadily climbing up the charts, it’s time for my first-ever re-review!

The first season didn’t do much for me as it followed Julia Haart and her children after they’d left their sheltered but stifling Charedi community to become rich fashion-business types. Primarily because, once they were established in their new lives, the most interesting part of that story was already over and nothing much ever happened.

A year later and this time it’s all go go go, as Julia is divorcing her new husband, while her daughter Batsheva does the same. Perhaps not the best advertisements for secular living, but at least that means there’s actually going to be some drama and they won’t need those incredibly annoying fake scripted cheesy segments as filler, right? Right?

Perhaps I’m fortunate it’s tax season so as the manufactured drama of the very rich glowed down upon the piles of receipts on my sitting room floor, I was just about distracted enough to not get too angry at what the producers were substituting for entertainment, whilst just about enough brain activity was stimulated to not slip into a coma.

In a future where humans are automatons in factory lines, this show on giant screens will be the perfect means to keep us docile yet productive.

My Unorthodox Life S2 E5 00 35 37 05 R

Home is where the Haarts are: a birthday gathering in My Unorthodox Life

Being embedded among towers of paper also meant I watched far more of the series than I’d planned to, so a reluctant emotional attachment was forged. Julia may be a strong, impressive, moral woman, yet her naivety that her ex is really going to just let her keep running his model agency is frustrating.

For all of the show’s emphasis on how amazing a businesswoman she is building an empire, it’s brutally shown to not actually be her empire at all, and no one makes that kind of money by being a nice guy, as the ensuing dirty tricks public divorce makes apparent.

Then, just as real emotional turmoil means you start to feel something, the programme makers can’t cope outside their comfort zone and jerk the wheel, resulting in constant oscillation between real and fake drama, sometimes entwining the two. Divorce is relegated to something disconcerting and distracting rather than destructive.

Ostensibly papering over it all is still the central concept of the family’s relationship to Judaism, but apart from the occasional threat to hold a Shabbos meal, intercut with them being served octopus, Julia and her children are more entrenched in the secular world than ever.

All that is except the youngest, who’s pushing the other way, getting more frum and wanting to go to yeshivah. And as an awkward teenager being exposed to campfire chats about how to make open relationships work, who can blame him?

The form that Julia’s Judaism predominantly takes now is the centrality of her children. Tragic that it seems to have cost her a dream marriage, but when the cameras stop rolling it’ll be what matters. It’s when the cameras are rolling that’s the problem.