This Sunday two new shows featuring time-travel elements will have their series premiere. These series have something else in common, too: a lead actor who is Jewish, or “Jew-ish, ish.”
In Fox’s Making History, Adam Pally, a comedian and the self-professed “Jewish Matthew McConaughey,” plays Dan, a college facilities manager who discovers he can travel to the past with the help of a special duffel bag (yes you read that correctly). He uses the apparatus to visit 18th-century Massachusetts, where he dates Paul Revere’s daughter, among other destinations (Al Capone’s Chicago; Nazi Germany). Historical misadventures ensue.
You likely last saw Pally (who was married IRL by a rabbi) as the un-stereotypically gay Max Blum on the short-lived but much-loved ABC sitcom, Happy Endings. He also sports a tattoo of his Hebrew name (Asher). “It’s not the best tattoo,” he once said. “I got it when I was 19 and now it looks like I was in a Tel Aviv prison and that I am someone’s property.”
Meanwhile, ABC’s Time After Time―a sci-fi show based on the Karl Alexander novel and 1979 film of the same name about a fictionalized H.G. Wells who chases Jack the Ripper through time to present-day New York―stars British actor Josh Bowman as the Ripper. Bowman has Russian Jewish ancestry on his father’s side (his maternal lineage includes English, Irish, and Italian ancestry), and in an interview with the Israeli news website Ynet, he identified as “Jew-ish, ish.” If he looks familiar, you might have seen him on another ABC show, Revenge, or in the tabloids when he briefly dated Amy Winehouse. Ever the Renaissance man, Bowman was also a professional rugby player in a former life.
Whether you like your Jewish men funny or hunky, you don’t have to travel very far to see Pally and Bowman in action.
Zoe Miller is Tablet’s editorial intern. Follow her on Twitter here.
