The Lizard (Kertenkele)

Kertenkele (The Lizard), called Kertenkele: Yeniden Doğuş in its last season, is an action, comedy, crime, romance and drama series that began on atv on October 25, 2014. Yalçın Şen produced it, and Hakan Kandal and Kemal Çelik wrote it. It is the Turkish adaptation of the 2004 film Marmoulak (The Lizard) by the Iranian director Kamal Tabrizi, and, like the film, it satirizes clerics, religion and the state of society. Kartal Çidamlı directed the first episodes, and Gülbin Aydın and Canan Çelik were the last directors. Episodes run about two hours.

The hero, played by Timur Acar, is a womanising professional thief; he gets his nickname from his ability to climb even a flat wall and from a lizard tattoo on his arm. Commissioner Ünsal has never managed to catch him. Kertenkele is caught while rescuing a child from a fire, goes to prison and meets an old imam in hospital. Escaping in the imam's clothes, he ends up leading prayers as Ziya Hoca in a neighborhood mosque. There he falls for Zehra (Sera Tokdemir), granddaughter of the real-estate tycoon Ekrem Bey, and Ünsal turns out to be Zehra's brother-in-law.

Timur Acar and Sera Tokdemir shared the leads in the first two seasons. In the third they left as the script required and the story changed; Ahmet Kayakesen, Asena Tuğal and Fatih Doğan took the leading roles. The series ran for three seasons and ended with its 85th episode on December 24, 2016.