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Where Jewish stars are shining on TV this season

Our guide to the Members of the Tribe in new and returning series and specials includes familiar faces and a few newcomers.
[additional-authors]
September 23, 2016

Our guide to the Members of the Tribe in new and returning series and specials includes familiar faces and a few newcomers. 

The dark comedy “Divorce” marks a return to HBO for “Sex and the City” star Sarah Jessica Parker (Oct. 9), and the cast of the network’s new sci-fi/Western hybrid “Westworld” features Evan Rachel Wood in a key role (Oct. 2). 

Woody Allen writes, directs and stars in his first TV series, “Crisis in Six Scenes,” streaming Sept. 30 on Amazon Prime. Elaine May, who hasn’t acted since Allen’s “Small Time Crooks” in 2000, came out of retirement to co-star in the six-episode comedy.

Lizzy Caplan is back as Virginia Johnson in the fourth season of Showtime’s “Masters of Sex,” (Sundays), and Pamela Adlon (“Louie”) stars in the FX comedy “Better Things” as a Jewish single mother of three and struggling actress (Thursdays).

Lizzy Caplan in “Masters of Sex”

Norman Lear is one of the correspondents in the Epix docuseries “America Divided,” which explores social inequality in the United States. The 94-year-old producer and activist reports on the New York housing crisis in the Sept. 30 premiere.

Norman Lear in “America Divided”

Emmanuelle Chriqui (“Entourage”) plays a hypnotist in the Hulu drama series “Shut Eye,” about fake psychics in L.A. (Dec. 7), and Tania Raymonde (“Lost”) is a hooker turned paralegal working with lawyer Billy Bob Thornton in Amazon’s “Goliath” (Oct. 14). Oded Fehr (“Covert Affairs,” “The Mummy”) joins ABC’s “Once Upon a Time” as Jafar, the villain from the movie “Aladdin” (Sept. 25). 

“American Idol” alumnus-turned-recording artist and Queen touring vocalist Adam Lambert plays Eddie in Fox’s “The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again” (Oct. 20), and Harvey Fierstein reprises his Tony-winning role as Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray Live!” coming to NBC on Dec. 7.

Adam Lambert in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”

Billy Eichner hits the Manhattan pavement for more “Billy on the Street” antics  (TruTV, TBA), Andy Samberg returns in the fourth season of Fox’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” (Sept. 20), and billionaire investor Mark Cuban is back for the eighth season of “Shark Tank” (ABC, Sept. 23).

Several Jewish actors and characters populate Amazon’s “Good Girls Revolt,” based on Lynn Povich’s book about women trying to crack the glass ceiling in a newsroom in 1969. Nora Ephron (Grace Gummer) is a main character, and Daniel Eric Gold, Leah Cohen and Israeli actress Odelya Halevi are in the cast of the newsroom drama (Oct. 28).

Also on Amazon, the highly anticipated third season of “Transparent,” now streaming, finds Maura (Jeffrey Tambor) seeking gender reassignment surgery. “Man in the High Castle,” set in an alternate-reality post-World War II America occupied by the victorious Nazis and Japanese, will go inside Germany in its second season. After the murder of his family, a fired up Frank Frink (Rupert Evans) explores his Jewish identity and joins the resistance (Dec. 16).

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