A very different 'hot rabbi' show is now on Max

"Reformed" is full of the Jewish meaning and questioning that's missing in "Nobody Wants This."

Delphine Horvielleur, the French rabbi whose book the new Max show “Reformed” (“Le Sens des Choses” in French) is loosely based on, like Adam Brody’s character in “Nobody Wants This,” is her own form of hot rabbi. Her books and writings are incredible, but she’s also been on the cover of French Elle, and is perhaps the country’s most well-known rabbi.

In “Reformed,” a rising Jewish French star, Elsa Guedj, who starred in Netflix’s “Standing Up,” plays Léa, a newly ordained female rabbi who returns to her native Strasbourg to become a community rabbi. Her father, deeply atheistic in revered French tradition (Laïcité, the French concept of secularism, is still to some extent queen and king in the nation), is against it. Between Freud, Galileo and Auschwitz, he tells his daughter, I thought we had agreed God didn’t exist.

Léa’s father isn’t the only person who stands in her way. This show doesn’t paint religion as hot or sexy. It portrays it as a part of life, messy and unclear. Léa’s first test as a new rabbi is a circumcision for the son of an interfaith couple, and it’s a subject that’s still so conflicted inside the Jewish community that it makes her contemplate if she is the right fit for this job.

The husband, non-Jewish, is fine raising his son as Jewish in the tradition of his Jewish wife. He loves Jewish culture, he tells her, and proceeds to list off Jewish things he finds meaningful like klezmer music, Yom Kippur, and the French cartoonist Joann Sfar (whose name gets hilariously and accurately translated into Larry David in the English subtitles). But circumcision? That’s where he draws the line. “That violence,” his mother says in support, echoing thoughts about Judaism that have long been held by those in contempt of it, “is not in our culture.”

I don’t want to spoil where the episode ends up, as I am hoping you will watch this excellent episode of Jewish TV yourself, but I will say this: It is full of genuine Jewish wisdom, the kind I was most thirsty for when watching “Nobody Wants This” and never got. Léa and other Jewish figures in the show offer reflections on religion that tie in so genuinely and meaningfully with our daily lived experience.

While the show has its own French sensibilities, a kind of irreverence that’s sometimes hard to find in American TV, it’s also very beautifully reverent. It was created and written by a Jewish French team, Noé Debré and Benjamin Charbit, who are both responsible for some pretty widely beloved French movies and TV shows (Charbit was a writer on iconic French comedian Gad Elmaleh’s very Jewish movie “Stay With Us”), and had a Jewish consultant, Faustine Sigal, who was very involved in the making of the show. (Full disclosure: Faustine and I are connected through Jewish geography, something I realized only after first writing about the show!) The result is a show with perhaps more Jewish depth than anything I’ve ever seen before — maybe the hottest rabbi show of them all.

The first two episodes of “Reformed” are now streaming on Max. Will you be watching?