Channel 4’s streaming service Walter Presents tends to specialise in international crime dramas and political thrillers, but it’s not all Norwegians looking for murders in the half light. Milk and Honey (All4) is a sunny comedy-drama from Israel about bees and sex.
If you’re wondering how they go about weaving bees and sex into the same narrative, it’s like this: following the death of his father, the handsome but transparently feckless Johnny Katzir returns to his family’s apiary and honey factory in Galilee. Things aren’t going well at home – the water’s been turned off, Johnny’s younger sister is about to be taken into care, and the honey business is failing. Johnny seems an unlikely rescuer.
Kais, the factory’s only employee, is so infrequently paid that he makes ends meet by hiring himself out as a male escort. Johnny discovers this after he pays a sales call on what he assumes is a female client, only for the encounter to take a turn for the steamy. After realising that sex work pays way better than beekeeping, he sets up an escort agency with Kais and two local layabouts, Itamar and Shimi.
The central fascination of foreign TV series is the view they afford on to other cultures. If their foreignness sometimes makes it hard to figure out what’s going on, it also forces you to withhold judgment – maybe that’s just how they do things there. The plot of Milk and Honey seems a little far-fetched, even silly, but then again I know nothing of sexual norms in rural Galilee. Perhaps there really are lots of attractive lonely women willing to pay good money to have sex with bee farmers.
Milk and Honey, like Johnny himself, has a certain lawless charm. Everybody’s on the make and nobody plays fair. Johnny’s little sister becomes, essentially, his pimp. The juxtaposition of moral vacuity and sexual explicitness is sometimes a little jarring – especially when it’s played for laughs. But for that reason, the show is also able to maintain an unsettling edge, and it is very funny in places.
Like almost everything in the Walter Presents stable, Milk and Honey is definitely worth a look to see if it’s your sort of thing. The trailer for forthcoming episodes makes it look as if it is going to get sexier as it goes on. I was hoping there would be more about bees.
