Split Season One - Episodes 1-15

Split

Summary: The series is about a 15-year-old girl named Ella Rozen, who begins high school along with her best friend, Omer Teneh. Green high school is managed by Amnon Green, a cold and stone-hearted person, who is secretly the head of "The Order of Blood" - An order which was founded 1000 years ago, and its purpose is to cleanse the world of vampires.

Number of Episodes: 45

Stars: Amit Farkash, Yon Tumarkin, Yedidya Vital

Language: Hebrew

Additional Info: Split, also called Hatsuya, is a half-hour Israeli teen series that ran for 3 seasons from 2009-2012.


I stumbled across Split one day when I was looking for Korean shows. The banner ad
described the show as "Buffy meets Glee" and I wanted to see if there were singing and dancing vampire hunters. At a 1/3 of the way through, there hasn't been any singing or dancing.

Ella Rozen is a split- half human and half vampire. She's led an ordinary life with her (unknown to her) adopted family, but becomes part of a vampire prophecy. Leo is set with the task of finding her, informing her of her heritage, and bringing her to the prophet, Ardak. Ardak's brother, Phaton, is after his position and will stage a mutiny to get it.

So far, the season has been pretty slow. While the first episode had some action-packed parts, it's mostly been about trying to ease Ella into the knowledge that she's adopted and there are vampires. Apparently, she will literally die from the shock. There are several secondary characters with threads of story starting, but not much has happened yet. Maybe, now that we've made some headway with Ella, the rest of the season will pick up.

A love triangle is building between Ella, Leo, and Omer. It's rather obvious where we are headed, but we are spared the insta-love that is prevalent in similar teen supernatural books, movies and TV. At this point, Leo considers Ella a job, Ella thinks Leo is weird, and Omer likes Ella but is friend-zoned. One thing that I do like is the relationship between Leo and Omer. Omer is basically Leo's unwanted sidekick.

The quality of the show is decent but not great. I say that because everything looks blandly neutral. The special effects aren't wonderful. Quite often in the first 15 episodes, we see Ella's ever-changing dream... and it looks really cheesy, especially when she's falling from a rooftop. There's also this weird light special effect when the vampires erase someone's memory or do anything else vampirey. It takes a little getting used to, but is not that bad in the end.

What I do have a hard time with is the English dubbed track. As a rule, I prefer to watch a live-action show or movie in it's original language with subtitles. I would have liked to watch Split with subtitles as well, but it's an incredibly hard show to track down. I managed to eventually find about half of the first season subtitled. Otherwise, all I can find is English dubbed. The dub track is not good and makes everything sound fake and almost comical- something that does not happen in the original Hebrew.

Truthfully, I'm surprised that Split hasn't been licensed in the US. It fits right in with the vampire thing that has been popular in the last few years. From what I can tell so far, it would probably be a great show for fans of vampires who are in the age range for shows like House of Anubis. There's very little out there on Split, though, and I haven't been able to find more than the first season.