The Pale will be compelling, binge-worthy entertainment; entrancing audiences with its exotic epoch and settings, the uneasy relationships of personalities from opposing social and economic backgrounds, and a continuous stream of surprising and disruptive events that shape a captivating narrative.
The themes, location, events and characters portrayed are timely and engaging, as they mirror the critical international geographic and socio-political issues taking place today. The world’s preoccupation with the Jews, despite their actual infinitesimal presence, is a near-mythic phenomenon. This pervasive awareness will translate into exceptionally large international attention for the series, generating extensive media attention from pundits, historians, and social media commentators.
The Pale is a heritage story that has yet to be told. While almost every Ashkenazi Jew in the world can point to their ancestry in The Pale of Settlement, hardly anyone knows what actually took place there and then, an aggregation of events that profoundly affected the course of history, impacting our world today. By 1850 the “Pale” contained the largest population of Jews anywhere, nearly five million people. The Tsars feared and loathed this unique sociological group, yet were economically dependent on them, a dynamic that engendered a century of unrelenting repressive social engineering. The unintended consequence of this was the accelerated transformation of a benign insular society into a hotbed of economic, sociopolitical, educational and cultural innovation.
While the historical genre on television has been reduced to parables of tribalism and conquest, palace intrigue soap operas, or fantasy worlds flavored with supernatural overtones, The Pale recreates a time and place made remarkable by the seismic political, social, economic and cultural events that took place there. It presents a window into a not-so-remote period of history that reflects our world right now – raging conflicts between conservative/reactionary autocratic regimes and enlightened progressive movements, worldwide political and economic upheaval, recurring natural disasters as an accepted norm, yet it’s ultimately optimistic – it shows how a vibrant, humanistic society emerges despite prolonged adversity – how good things come from bad.
No medium is more capable and potent than streaming television for effectively delivering complex, long-form narratives over an extended duration. The Pale will become a world-wide media event.