Austin, 2006. Five Orthodox rabbis roll into town with their families, money from back east and a U-Haul of folding tables. Their job is to bring Jewish students at the University of Texas into Orthodox life. Their founder, Rabbi Shimon Salant, is funny, brilliant and delighted to be argued with, and a local freshman who has waited his whole life for someone to argue back can’t stay away. Neither can the young women at Salant’s Friday table. He likes to drive them home himself.
An original series concept byJacob Sager· Inspired by real events · Every character is invented · Proof-of-concept footage made inSora· Not a network show
First Look
“He's here for learning, they said.But it feels like he's here for everyone.”
#079 · Here for everyone · 0:15
A 15-second concept promo: sorority girls at the kosher deli counter with a man in a black hat beside them, a frat party, the kollel at a picnic table. One of 52 promos made in Sora as proof of concept.
The Story
He rode in from Jerusalem. Nobody asked why.
Everybody thinks they know who everybody else is.
Ron Finchmann is eighteen, a freshman at the University of Texas and the kid at the Hillel front desk who knows everybody’s cousin. He grew up in Jewish Austin, and he has run out of people to argue with.
A week into the semester, a rabbi stops him on the West Mall and tells him the Psalms were the first concept album. The rabbi belongs to the Far West Kollel: five young rabbis who have just moved their families to Austin with a budget to bring college students into Orthodox life. Ron goes to their first class to heckle. He stays to argue.
The founder, Rabbi Shimon Salant, is the funniest, sharpest teacher Ron has ever met, and he always has time. There are free Shabbat dinners, and the Kollel pays students to come learn. For some students it’s the best thing that has ever happened to them.
Salant has his own uses for the attention. He studies with students one on one. Young women ride home in his car. A junior named Lauren moves out of her boyfriend’s apartment and into the Salants’ guest room, and within the week his rabbis are at Hillel explaining it was her idea. His wife, Leah, knows why they had to leave Jerusalem.
The men around him each know something. One reads a student’s private chat aloud in the car, for laughs. One drives past Ron’s parents’ house. One has been told to keep quiet, and spends a car ride calming Ron down. Meanwhile Maya, Ron’s oldest friend, starts spending Friday nights at the Salants’.
The rest of Jewish Austin is losing patience. Kollel flyers go up over Hillel’s, and Salant’s father-in-law takes over the town’s little Orthodox congregation. By spring Hillel is holding a Shabbat for every Jewish student and leaving the Kollel’s rabbis out. Then Salant is quietly removed. Nobody tells the students why. On the first Sunday of every month, his rental car is back on Far West Blvd.
The Western, Translated
Westerns teach you to watch the man in the black hat. Far West has a dozen of them, and they brought their families.
Outside money sends families west to settle, and the people already here have lives of their own. Some are glad of the teachers and the extra men at services. Some don't like what is happening with the students. The fights happen at dinner tables and in borrowed rooms, among people who will see each other again next week.
UT freshman, Hillel front desk, the guy who knows everybody’s cousin. He grew up in Jewish Austin and has run out of people to argue with. He wants the hard texts and the smart opponents, and he wants to find out how far three thousand years of argument can take a kid from Northwest Hills. He goes to the Kollel’s first class to heckle and stays to argue.
Wants
A world bigger than Austin, and a way into it that’s his own.
Carries
A RAZR, his grandfather’s Chumash, a burned CD labeled “shiurim + Wilco.”
The founder. The funniest person in any room and the most attentive. Teaches the laws of Shabbat like a stand-up set, quotes the Maharal from memory, remembers your grandmother’s name. He is also a predator. The outreach gives him students to study with alone, a house where they spend Friday nights, and young women who ride home in his car. Jewish Austin gives him a reputation, and he tends it.
Wants
Committed students, an operation that answers only to him, and access he can use.
Carries
A black hat, two cell phones, the home number of every donor in Dallas.
The founder’s wife and his partner in all of it. Rabbi Wasser’s daughter, five kids, a house that seats thirty. She knows why the organization moved them from Jerusalem to Texas so suddenly. She tells strangers at the H-E-B the family legend of his drive from Baltimore, singing Tehillim the whole way. She sets the Friday table, decides where everyone sits, and takes a special interest in the young women who come to dinner. When one needs a place to stay, the guest room is ready. She is tired, very funny about Texas, and nobody’s fool.
Wants
His success. She has staked her family on it.
Hides
Why they left Jerusalem.
Carries
A twelve-quart pot, a baby monitor, an H-E-B card worn smooth.
Webmaster, homebrewer, happiest employee. His name means “deer deer.” He works the folding table on the West Mall and wins arguments about the Psalms. When Lauren moves into the founder’s house, he is the one at Hillel explaining that it was entirely her idea.
Wants
To be the cool rabbi, and for the mission to be good.
Hides
Whether he believes what he’s repeating.
Carries
A hydrometer, the Dreamweaver password, a keg of Shabbos stout.
Former Michigan frat president, current fraternity whisperer. Runs the learning fellowship: a stipend for every session, a bonus for every friend. When the founder forwards Seth’s fake chat, Tarfon reads it out loud in the car. He emails Ron about Frisbee and a paid job in the same paragraph, and he has driven past Ron’s family’s house.
Wants
Numbers that make him matter to the founder.
Carries
A brand-new BlackBerry Pearl, a case of kosher jerky, a sign-up sheet.
The best teacher in the Kollel and its least comfortable employee. He came for the learning. Students trust him because he tells them the truth when it hurts. He knows what Salant is doing, and he has been told to stand down. In late January he shows up at Hillel shaken, asks Ron to sit in his car, and talks until Ron feels better. That is the job now.
Wants
To keep his family’s place, and his own decency.
Hides
What he knows, and who told him to keep quiet.
Carries
A minivan with a cracked windshield, a Gemara held together with tape.
The only Kollel wife who loves Austin. On dark nights she swims Barton Springs during the free hour, however cold it is, with a women-only group of hippies she found on her own. Works at the Jewish community preschool on Hart Lane. The one Kollel person Marcy actually likes.
Wants
To stay. The kids are happy here.
Hides
She knows more about Hillel’s side than she says at home.
Carries
A swim cap, a box of finger paints, a minivan full of other people’s kids.
The fun one. Met the others in Jerusalem but was never quite one of them. Talks three regulars out of Chabad in his first month. Gives his three-year-old a sip of beer at the Shabbat table, then pours for the freshmen. Learns with Josh every Tuesday. At Purim he is the one they fire.
Wants
To be the rabbi the students actually like.
Hides
How secure his place in the organization really is.
Carries
A sippy cup, a guitar with two strings missing, a six-pack of Shiner.
Leah’s father, and an old hand in the organization. He knows the founder’s past and the choices that sent him to Texas. Comes down from Baltimore in the fall and becomes rabbi of the little Orthodox congregation, which now shares its rabbi, its men and its calendar with his son-in-law’s operation. Goes home for the winter. Comes back for Purim and can’t understand why everyone is so tense.
Wants
A pulpit, and grandchildren close by.
Hides
Everything that happened before Austin.
Carries
A garment bag, a folding shtender, a box of Purim groggers.
Retired dentist. Has kept Austin’s little Orthodox congregation alive in rented rooms since the eighties, phoning around every Friday to make sure ten men show up for prayers. Now it has a rabbi of its own and twenty young men at services, all of them from the Kollel. His congregants can’t agree whether that is a rescue or a takeover.
Wants
Ten men on Saturday morning without having to phone around.
Hides
He liked it better when it was small.
Carries
A Rolodex, the congregation’s only Torah, a key to a rented room.
Ron’s closest friend since Hebrew school, decisive where he is wry. Pre-med, with an Israeli father who thinks religion is for grandmothers. She takes the learning seriously and starts building a religious life of her own. After an Israel trip, her Friday nights move to the Salants’ house, and Salant drives her home himself. What she wants from Judaism is hers. What he wants from her is something else.
Wants
A serious Jewish life that belongs to her.
Carries
A Canon PowerShot, a Hebrew-English siddur, a phone she starts turning off.
Junior from Dallas, sorority treasurer, never does anything halfway. Six weeks after her first Shabbat dinner she has taken on religious observance and moved out of her boyfriend Seth’s apartment into the Salants’ guest room. The rabbis tell Hillel she chose it and nobody pushed. By finals she is back with Seth, and that is her choice too.
Wants
Something that feels like certainty.
Hides
Leaving was easier than coming back.
Carries
Two suitcases, a borrowed long skirt, Seth’s hoodie.
Lauren’s boyfriend. Senior, owns a grill and a futon, has never been inside a synagogue on purpose. Sure the founder took her, he and Benji invent a freshman on AIM as bait, to catch Salant going after her. It takes Salant one line to see through it.
Wants
Lauren back, and to win.
Hides
How fast she changed scared him.
Carries
A Dell laptop, a screen name ending in 613, her toothbrush.
Directs Hillel, UT’s Jewish student center, from a building that opened in February. One of her board members loves the newcomers, and the board hates conflict. In March she builds a coalition, Reform, Conservative, Chabad, for a Shabbat that welcomes every student and shuts out the Kollel’s rabbis. She isn’t sure it’s right. She does it anyway.
Wants
To keep her students and her donors.
Hides
Some of this is about protecting what she built.
Carries
Forty keys on one ring, a laminated room schedule, Wednesday’s bagels.
Ron’s roommate, an Alpha Epsilon Pi pledge, co-inventor of the fake freshman on AIM, president of nothing. In the spring the Kollel flies in a rabbi from Los Angeles who just wants to take him to lunch.
Wants
A girlfriend, a fraternity, free food. In that order.
Hides
He is easy to buy and impossible to keep bought.
Carries
A pledge paddle, a Shiner Bock, the AEPi listserv password.
Engineering, from Corpus Christi. Didn’t know a soul at UT until Rabbi Kotzk started studying with him on Tuesdays. Whatever happens to the Kollel, that part was real, and Josh never lets Ron forget it.
Wants
To keep his teacher, whatever happens to the institution.
Carries
A TI-89, a Gemara with his name in it, Kotzk’s cell number.
Every character is a fictional composite, not a portrait of a real person. The stills come from the AI concept promos and are not casting.
The Territory
The rabbis live in northwest Austin. Their students live near UT.
Far West
Where the families live
Live oaks, cul-de-sacs, minivans. Far West Boulevard runs west from MoPac into Northwest Hills and crosses Hart Lane, where the Jewish community campus has stood since 2000, with a Conservative synagogue on the same grounds. The kosher deli is inside the H-E-B on Village Center Drive.
Into this arrive five families from back east, who have just bought a great many folding tables.
West Campus
Where the students are
Fraternity porches, red cups, a neighborhood starting to come down for towers. Hillel has a new building on San Antonio Street. The West Mall is where every group on campus sets up a table and tries to make eye contact.
The Kollel rents a house nearby for student dinners and classes. There is homebrewed stout in the garage.
The man is gone, then the families. The street sign stays.
The stills come from the AI concept promos. They are not photographs, and the signs in them are invented.
2004
The city rezones West Campus for density. By 2006 the fourplexes are coming down and the cranes are going up. Students walk to class past holes where their friends used to live.
Jan 4, 2006
Texas beats USC in the Rose Bowl for the national championship. The Tower glows orange after every win that fall.
Feb 2006
Texas Hillel dedicates its new building on San Antonio Street, a block from campus.
Sept 5, 2006
Facebook launches News Feed. Hundreds of thousands of students join protest groups. Three days later Mark Zuckerberg apologizes.
Sept 12, 2006
The BlackBerry Pearl goes on sale. Students still flip open RAZRs. Adults with jobs now carry their email in their pockets.
Jan 9, 2007
Apple announces the iPhone. It goes on sale June 29, after this story's school year is over. Nobody in it has one.
Every night
AIM away messages, MySpace Top 8s, point-and-shoot cameras uploading whole parties to Facebook albums, flyers stapled over flyers.
The places and dates in this list are real and checked against public sources. The story built on top of them is fiction.
The Promos
52 promos for a show that doesn't exist yet.
Made in Sora between November 2025 and March 2026, before it could keep a face consistent from one shot to the next. So the show is pitched the way networks sell a series nobody has seen: title sequences, promos and bumpers. Faces change from promo to promo. The world holds.
About 10 minutes in all. Every promo has its own page and link. Tap one to play it with sound; the player moves on to the next unless you turn that off.
Overheard in the footage
“You live here long?”“Long enough.”“You like it?”“Ask me at sunrise.”
Every medium of 2006 shows a different piece of the same year.
In Far West Blvd, who knows what depends on how it traveled: a chat someone saved, an email that is three things at once, a phone in the hand of the man who decides who hears it, a dinner with no record at all. Everything below is invented for the show.
Fictional artifact
IM with RabbiSalant
frumhopeful613: hi rabbi!! i'm a freshman at UT and i think i'm ready to become completely religious. like this week
frumhopeful613: my parents don't understand me. also i'm from Plano. also i have a horse
RabbiSalant: Tell Seth the horse was too much.
RabbiSalant has signed off. 10:52 PM
AIMMade in a minute. Forwarded in a second.
Fictional artifact
Pearl · Inbox (3)
From: S. Salant Subj: FW: frumhopeful613
See below. Funny. Read it to the guys tonight.
Sent from my BlackBerry
BlackBerryOne man forwards it. Another reads it to the car.
Fictional artifact
utmail · Inbox
From: Yoni Tarfon Subj: frisbee + quick q
Ron! Frisbee at Murchison Sunday? Also can you fix a hookah (asking for a friend, the friend is me). Also we have a paid student-coordinator spot, ten bucks an hour, mostly emails and sign-ups, you'd be perfect. Also Shabbos? Leah's making the brisket.
EmailSent from a teacher, a friend and an employer.
Fictional artifact
facebook · Far West Kollel @ UT
Members: 214 · Network: Texas
Zevi Hirsch wrote: SHABBOS AT THE CAMPUS HOUSE this week, bring friends, bring appetite, bring questions!!
Posted January 26, 2007 · 3 comments
FacebookStill online.
Fictional artifact
Fri. night · back of an H-E-B receipt
S.MayaLeahLauren2 newJoshkidsRon, no
Leah's seating chart
The Shabbat tableNo phones on Shabbat. This is the only record.
Fictional artifact
Student Organization Registration
Organization: Jewish Learning Society at UT President: Brett Schwartz (Sammy) Faculty advisor: ______ Purpose: Learning. Food.
Two signatures missing
The paperworkRabbis can't register a student club. Brett can.
About
An original series in development.
The project
Far West Blvd is an original, fictional limited-series concept: a dark-comedy Western inspired by real events in Austin's Jewish community between 2006 and 2008. The characters, scenes and dialogue are invented composites. It is not a documentary and makes no factual claims about real people or organizations.
Where it stands
In development. No network, studio, cast or financing is attached. The 52 promos on this site are proof-of-concept footage generated in Sora, built alongside a series bible, this episode outline and a body of background research.
Who made it
Created by Jacob Sager, who grew up in Jewish Austin and was a student there when the events that inspired the show took place. The series is about how a predator works through a community’s best habits: a teacher who calls back, a family that makes room at dinner, a job offered to a student who needs it. It is also about the people around him, what each of them saw, and what they decided to say.
The show should be funny about that, and serious about the people it happened to.
For producers, writers, representatives and collaborators: jacob@brandnewcolors.com
Produced in Sora. Every clip on this site was generated in Sora as concept footage. None of it is from a finished show.
The logos are not mine. Network names and logos that appear in the clips, including HBO, Max, Netflix, FX, Showtime, Peacock and TNT, belong to their respective rights owners. They appear only as part of the mock-ups. No network is attached to this project or has endorsed it.
Other brands belong to their owners too. Store and product names that show up on screen, such as H-E-B, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Dr. Brown's, MySpace and Facebook, are trademarks of their respective owners.
Inspired by true events. This is a dramatization: scenes, characters and dialogue are invented.
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