Tehran is about a young Mossad agent who is installed secretly into Iranian sensitive infrastructure in Tehran only for her to be pretty much found out almost immediately by a chance meeting with an innocent civilian who knew her from her days working with the IDF. This tips off Iranian security forces and the spy vs. spy hunt is on.
Perhaps as a nod to my own myopic jingo-entitlement bias regarding film and television production, it took me quite a few episodes before I realized that although much of the show is in English with actors speaking English, of course, there are many parts in Farsi and Hebrew with the former subtitled and the latter dubbed. "Why dubbed?" I wondered, and then I realized... this isn't an American TV show. Sure enough, it is in fact Israeli, but, as I implied, done so well as to make me think it was an A-list Hollywood made creation.
Like that above mentioned awesome HBO show, I love me a good spy thriller. Slow Horses scratched that itch recently but its next season, of course, isn't for, well, a shit fuck long time from now. So this will do nicely. I'm taking it in gently and leisurely. It's a info-packed plot with a lot going on and unlike my most recent prior two binges, so far, it seems a bit more tightly wound in the writing department. Plus, it is a tad labor intensive for the viewer, even for me, a quick reader, in that there are a LOT of subtitles.
And of course, I'm watching this work of fiction as it plays out with the events of the real world, in real time, almost beat for beat in sync. The show, in the last episode, actually had a protest that grew into a bit of a mob and two opposing camps of protesters grappling along with the police forces. It was spurred on by one of the issues that has come up in the current massive protests across Iran, the subjugation of women and their enslavement into wearing the hijab.
I can feel the quite strong anti-Iranian bias in this show already, here in season one which was shot maybe back in 2019. I can only imagine that will get more intense as the subsequent seasons were produced in the wake of shit like October 7 and stuff. Remember all the TV shows in the US shortly after 9/11 that had, shall we say, a quite dark outlook on Islamic terrorist organizations and the cultures that they spring from. Shit, I mean, just look at Homeland, for instance.
With the world seemingly going to hell in a handbasket right now, seriously, I don't even know why I read my news feed any more, I'll just watch this piece of fiction and munch on my metaphorical popcorn. Naturally, the Gladys Kravitz in me will have to peek out the hole I make in my curtains every now and then to see how it's all going down.