Ron Leshem on New Series ‘Paranoia’ in Brazil, What Makes a Good Show

Oscar-nominated for “Beaufort” and co-creator of the original Israeli series which inspired Sam Levinson’s “Euphoria,”  the second most-watched series in HBO history, writer-creator Ron Leshem ranks as one of the highest-profile standard bearers of a local-to-global drive that has counted for a significant part of the most inspiring TV made over the last 20 years.

So one large question, as global streaming services focus on local for local and TV operators worldwide play far safer, where does that leave Leshem now?

The short answer is that Leshem is “excited,” he tells Variety before a Canneseries masterclass. “There are so many reasons why today must be the Golden Age of global drama, and why indie can save TV drama just as it saved cinema multiple times,” he enthuses with typical passion.

Leshem is serving by example. He has “never been so excited” about a project since the first season of “Euphoria” and “Beaufort’s” Academy Award recognition than by “Paranoia,” which is heading into production in Brazil with Globoplay and Janeiro Studios. 

Though based in Los Angeles in partnership with CAA, his label Crossing Oceans primarily produces globally. Set up with longtime co-scribes Amit Cohen and Daniel Amsel, currently, beyond “Paranoia,” Crossing Oceans has an upcoming series in Australia; “Pegasus,” a European co-production; “Revolution” a France Télévisions series created in collaboration with Iranian filmmakers, and an additional season of “Bad Boy,” which is also being adapted into an American remake.

“Global drama is perceived as a cheap budget solution, plus an exotic niche, and as Hollywood’s R&D lab,” Leshem reflected to Variety just before Canneseries. “But the power of global drama isn’t just contained in budgets (where in many countries you can indeed produce six seasons of high-end drama for the price of one American single episode sometimes). But more importantly, it opens the door to new setups, new worlds and journey, new energy. It can reinvent the screen. Dare. Surprise,” he adds. 

That does’t mean losing the audience, Leshem argues. 

“We need to tell “edgy mainstream,” sharp, daring, risky, boundary-pushing stories, with mass appeal, built to feel like an event. The next mainstream won’t come from playing safe. We need to act as a community of writers and producers. I’ve made it my personal mission to help global writers in this field and to help elevate the sense of global community among drama creators.”

“Amit and I split our time between projects where we write every word ourselves and projects we produce across four continents these days,” Leshem says. 

“These are projects we develop with deep creative involvement together with local creators,” he adds. 

One case in point: “Paranoia.” It was described when announced at October’s Mipcom as “bringing to screen unsung characters from all around Brazil, taking place in a contemporary and vibrant Rio de Janeiro, exposed as never seen before.”

“Working with the drama team at Globoplay in Brazil has turned out to be the most inspiring, intelligent, and genuinely heartwarming creative dialogues of my life,” said Leshem. “Also, the first time I walked into their studios in Rio, I found facilities more impressive than anything in Hollywood, not just technologically, but workplace culture, the human atmosphere.”

Leshem came to Cannes with tips about how to attract global partners. “Generally, I would say: Every show today has to feel electric,” he tells Variety. “There are four elements, and at least two must feel genuinely new for it to break through and become an event: a world we haven’t seen before on tv, a protagonist with a voice or journey we haven’t seen, a cross-genre that hasn’t been done in series, or a cinematic language that invents something. And that means we must be bold and take risks.”

‘Euphoria’ and the Journey

From 1998, in Israel, Leshem worked as a journalist, rising to deputy editor-in-chief and head of the news division at Maariv in 2001. He transitioned to TV in 2005, working in content development for Keshet Broadcasting, where he became chief of content and programming at the network, picking up development on shows such as “False Flag” and “Prisoners of War.” The latter went on to be adapted into “Homeland” in the U.S.

As a writer, however, “I felt I wouldn’t be able to write a word until ‘Euphoria’ was cracked. Inspired in part by “Skins,” it was a portrait of Israel’s new youth. Amit Cohen and Leshem “wrote on a white board: ‘Age 17 is the new 25, but 40 is also the new 25. You’re stuck.’ Stories that seem to belong to age 25, but when they are fitted onto a high schooler’s body, childishness erupts and it’s disturbing. We wrote: ‘Sex is easier than a kiss,’ ‘Wanting is stronger than achieving, searching is more thrilling than finding.’ ‘Heroes who live everywhere except reality; reality has been exhausted; chasing euphoria through drugs and screens, porn and illusions, looking for purpose in an ocean of emptiness. A generation that feels everything and struggles to contain it.’”

Set in 2012 and written with Daniel Amsel and Daphna Levin, “Euphoria” “didn’t try to be realistic. It was just a broken fantasy with emotional truth about freedom poisoning, about love as an answer to meaninglessness, and about how youth trauma shapes the entire course of a life,” Leshem recalls.

But when it came out, Leshem was deeply frustrated by the results. “For the price of a single American drama episode, we could produce seven seasons, 60 episodes of a high-end drama. The toll is heavy: We had to settle for fewer than 20 scenes per episode sometimes, not a pace that would illustrate the attention deficit of that age. 

“The HBO version would have 100 scenes in some episodes. We filmed magical realism scenes, but with the meager money we had, they came out crooked and we threw them to the editing room floor.”

When the original “Euphoria” launced on Israel’s HOT in 2012, “we felt misunderstood, and since we couldn’t fulfil most of the vision and ideas because of budget constraints,” Leshem tells Variety.

So Leshem  and Hadas Lichenstein spent six years “knocking on every door in L.A.”—going back again to all twenty networks that had passed on “Euphoria” and had analytically explained why the show will never be made.

“The iron rule in television, unlike cinema, stated that if the main hero is a teenager, it is necessarily a youth drama that won’t bring an adult audience, not even 20-somethings. Our friends behind ‘Stranger Things’ went through the same thing – 20 networks also passed on it, for that very reason,” Leshem remembers.

Yet, as Hadas Lichtentstein and Leshem went around with a presentation for an American series, the youth experience was changing in the background. 

Finally, Leshem met with Casey Bloys and Francsca Orsi who suggested “Euphoria” to Sam Levinson. “Sam is truly a rare genius, who manages to lead 600 crew members like an genuine leader and still remain a lonely artist with exposed nerves, a painter and composer in his soul,” says Leshem. 

“Frannie asked him to weave in his own personal wound as a teenager. Rue’s addiction began with the painkillers of her father, who was dying of cancer. The opioid epidemic, which claimed 800,000 victims in the US, and sometimes dozens of children from the same community, felt like a burning scar, yet ground that had not been treated in series.”

With Levinson on board as showrunner, Leshem, who took a writer credit for the pilot episode, was free to focus on new shows, which he has done with extraordinary energy. 

Leshem’s Life Journey

Based since 2013 out of the U.S., Leshem’s life odyssey has been lived with passion and sometimes deep regret. Leshem and Cohen first met as members of the Israeli military’s elite 8200 intelligence unit. 

“I was the head of the intelligence unit [overseeing] the Palestinian peace talks. We were aware that so many powers, on both sides, were trying to sabotage it,” Leshem has recalled.  

“When hope collapsed, I was already a journalist, spending every evening looking at photos of dead bodies. I felt like I was carrying this tragedy on my shoulders, inhaling every casualty and every name of a kid that was killed.” 

Leshem’s wartime experience inspired “Beaufort” and “Valley of Tears” and the emotional throughline of his whole career: the need for empathy with the “other.”

In “Valley of Tears,” which won Series Mani’s 2020 top Grand Prix, a young Israeli intel officer, Avinoam Shapira, encounters a wounded Syrian, supposedly the enemy. He starts talking with him and discovers things in common. Then one of Shapira’s fellow soldiers turns up and shoots the Syrian dead. 

Hulu/Arte series “No Man’s Land,” which remarkably played in the same main competition at Series Mania in 2020, has Antoine, a construction engineer corroded by guilt at his sister’s death in a terrorist attack, who thinks he glimpses her in TV footage of the Kurdish YPG militia. 

Minutes later in series terms, he has made it over the border from Turkey into Syria and into an extraordinary, if highly grounded true-facts-based world where he is transformed, finding a sense of belonging, fighting alongside women soldiers in the YPG.

Most of “Bad Boy,” which scored a 2025 International Emmy nomination, turns on young teenager Dean (Guy Menaster), who spends much of his teen years in a juvenile detention facility for peddling drugs. It’s not an adolescence most of the series’ audience would readily identify with. 

“Much like in ‘Euphoria,’ I was very drawn to exploring the impact of trauma or childhood mistakes on a person’s trajectory and on the ability to heal and conquer your own destiny,” Leshem has told Variety.

“But what changed in me since ‘Euphoria’ is that it seems the human capacity to feel compassion and empathy for those who are different is dying, it is an epidemic, and drama is the only tool I know to fight and believe that we can transform the world,” he added.

“With all due respect to ‘local for local,’ we need much deeper, earlier collaboration, across writing, packaging, and production – not just hope stories will travel,” Leshem told Variety just before Canneseries. 

“Especially since the world is spinning out of control, and turning away from globalization and empathy – creating together as global community of drama is also the right thing to do.”

Expect announcements on more Crossing Oceans series soon.