Alon Aranya spots strong thriller premises and develops them for international audiences. Hostages reveals the risk: its opening grips, but fifteen episodes require more convincing characters than the writing provides.
Fi1m perspective
A surgeon is forced into an assassination plot in Hostages (2013), a premise that needs little explanation before it starts to worry us. Alon Aranya has a good eye for that sort of immediate pressure, and much of his work involves finding international stories to adapt. We were gripped at first by Hostages, because Toni Collette gives us someone worth watching amid the threats. The disappointment is how steadily the implausible plotting wears that feeling away.
His early adaptation work included selling programmes from scripts rather than finished episodes. He helped develop Hostages with Jeffrey Nachmanoff, selling it from a pilot script before the Israeli version had been filmed. Red Widow (2013) and Betrayal (2013), both executive-producing credits, adapted Dutch formats. That requires a particular skill: recognising which part of a story will interest an audience unfamiliar with its original setting.
On Hostages, Aranya shares writing credits with Nachmanoff, Nick Santora and Joshua Allen, and its weaknesses are shared responsibilities. Yet the fifteen-episode series exposes a problem central to this kind of thriller: the opening predicament has to keep generating credible behaviour. There is room for quieter scenes to make the people matter, but the character drama too often feels unearned. That leaves the plot demanding indulgence when it should be tightening the suspense. Collette supplies a reason to continue, but we cannot recommend so much television on the strength of its initial grip.
His work broadened towards original international co-productions with the launch of Paper Plane Productions in 2018. His executive-producing credits include Your Honor (2020), with writer Peter Moffat, and Tehran (2020), with writer and creator Moshe Zonder. We would distinguish that work from the writing on Hostages: selecting a story and assembling its collaborators are substantial jobs, but they do not tell us who made a particular scene work. Approach Hostages for Collette, not for a plot that will withstand much questioning.
Biography
Alon Aranya is an Israeli producer and writer. He developed and co-wrote the American adaptation of the Israeli series Hostages (2013) for CBS, on which he also served as co-executive producer.
Aranya received a BFA in Film and Television from Tel Aviv University and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He has produced or executive-produced series including Red Widow (2013), Betrayal (2013), Your Honor (2020) and Tehran (2020). In 2018 he founded Paper Plane Productions, which develops and finances international drama series.
He is a faculty member at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.
