Ron Ninio on Remaking Your Honor

Season two of the hit legal drama Your Honor recently launched on Showtime, with Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) continuing in the lead role as a judge who must protect his son at any cost. The series is based on an Israeli original, Kvodo, from Yes Studios, created by Ron Ninio (director) and Shlomo Mashiach (writer).

“During the production, I felt that the material could hold as a format,” Ninio tells TV Formats Weekly. “Winning the first prize at Series Mania started a wave of interest from a variety of different countries.” Kvodo was a Grand Prix winner at the 2017 Series Mania Festival and an official selection at multiple other international festivals, including the Zurich Film Festival, Chicago International TV Festival, Germany’s SerienCamp and the Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival.

The U.S. adaptation for Showtime was the first outside of Israel for the show. And now, remakes have been traveling around the world—from France, Germany and Italy to Turkey, India, South Korea and Russia. The latest of the ten markets it has been licensed into as a format is Croatia. “It is number one in terms of remakes of a scripted format,” says Ninio.

As for what makes the series ripe for adaptation, Ninio credits the “ancient conflict between family and the law of justice; being a loving father and bending the law versus being an idealistic judge.” He adds, “Anybody in the world, anybody human, can relate to the father-son relationship. What would you do if the hit-and-run accident by your son came to your doorstep?”

And so sets up the premise of the show: the story follows an upstanding judge who gets mixed up in the mafia underworld through a tragic twist of fate after his teenage son is involved in a hit and run.

Each of the adaptations has taken to mind the local judicial systems in the countries where the remakes take place as well as the municipal politics and who the “bad guys” are, Ninio explains. Some countries, such as Turkey and India, also have longer episodes and many more per season than the original.

In advising on what to keep at the heart of local versions, Ninio says, “Be as local as you can. The more local the remake is (in my case, the more Israeli the universal story is), the better.”

The Hebrew-language Kvodo itself, which ran for two seasons on Israel’s Yes satellite channel between 2017 and 2019, has been picked up by platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, which gave the Israeli thriller its U.S. debut.