Keshet Confirms February Bow In Israel Of Ambitious Reality Series ‘2025’

In a keynote appearance at NATPE, Keshet CEO Avi Nir said 2025, a new reality series that has spawned rumors in the Israeli press in recent months, will begin airing in two weeks.

Backers describe the show as a singular blend of Black Mirror, Westworld, The Truman Show and Monopoly. Earlier this month, Keshet started teasing 2025 on social media, posting and then deleting images of a restaurant, a clothing store and a bank, from the show’s set south of Tel Aviv.

Nir said the show will air four days a week, wrapping in the spring, but for the moment broadcasts are planned only in Israel. “We’ve been approached by everybody” to take the show wider, he said, but no partnerships with other networks have been set.

An entire “gold city” has been built for the show on the outskirts of Yavne, just south of Tel Aviv, with its own neighborhood reminiscent of that in The Truman Show. A trailer for the show leaked last fall, and sources at that time confirmed to Deadline it was in the pipeline, but Nir’s comments were the most extensive official ones to date.

At NATPE, Nir described the show as “very contemporary in that it is fundamentally about transparency,” Nir said.

Keshet describes the setting of the show as a “new world,” or, more specifically, a “near future world of social currency and transparency.” Six residents of the world are designated as “operators” of the future-world city, and they interact with with new residents. All have their status, options and fate determined by the social currency they manage to obtain.

2025 was developed by Yoram Zak, who was the director of the Israeli version of Big Brother, and Erez Tal, who hosted the Endemol Shine format.