With just four episodes, Unorthodox has captured a worldwide audience. The Netflix series starring Shira Haas as Esty Shapiro, a young woman who flees her arranged marriage and the Hasidic community she’s called home for her short 19-year-old life, has gathered buzz since its March 26 debut. And despite the acclaim and attention—and more source material to draw from—there aren’t plans for more Unorthodox.
Writer and producer Anna Winger told Metro there are no plans to revisit Etsy Shapiro’s story or to adapt from Deborah Feldman‘s further books. Unorthodox was based on Feldman’s memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots.
“We’re not doing a sequel to this because we feel that we really told this story. It was always designed as a mini-series. ‘I suspect that I will work with these actors again, and with many of my collaborators from this project. We have a lot of new things in development,” Winger said. “So, it’s not the end of the road for this constellation, but I don’t think we’ll tell this story again. We’ve told it.”
Unorthodox follows Etsy as she travels in secret from Williamsburg, Brooklyn to Berlin, Germany after a series of events at home leaves her doubting her place in the Jewish community her mother previously fled. In Berlin, Esty meets a group of musicians who open her eyes to the secular world.
The miniseries ends with some dangling questions, not every storyline gets tied into a bow. Given the entertainment industry’s propensity to continue stories beyond their shelf life, the desire to know more about what happened to Esty is understandable.
All four episodes of Unorthodox and a mini documentary are now streaming on Netflix.
