Tehran is hardly the first television drama to focus on how Israel’s intelligence agencies operate in the Muslim world. It’s often unclear who’s outsmarting whom. In turn, she manipulates him to help crack Iran’s aerial defense system and clear the way for an Israeli attack. Played with puppy-dog geekiness by the Iranian British actor Shervin Alenabi, he guides her through a methamphetamine-blurred world where counterrevolution is galvanized and sexual boundaries are crossed. In a tightly wound performance by the Israeli actor Niv Sultan, Rabinyan infiltrates the underground scene by flirting on the dark web, where she engages with a student activist and fellow hacker named Milad. Much of Tehran’s appeal in Israel was in its flouting of stereotypes about life in a strict Islamic society and its suggestion that Iran’s rebellious youth culture is not unlike Israel’s own. Like many of the best modern spy tales, Tehran gets the viewer so close to current politics that the plot unfolding on the screen could-with a bit of imagination-be happening outside. Israel is suspected to have been behind the blasts but has neither accepted nor denied it. If the home audience in Israel wasn’t already intrigued, the TV series had some uncanny real-life echoes when it aired in July at the same time as a string of explosions rocked Iran’s assembly plant for nuclear centrifuges in Natanz and other sites across the country. Stock aerial footage grounds the action inside the Iranian capital while scenes filmed by the Israeli production company in Athens present a rough approximation of downtown Tehran. Under the main story arc of an epic Israeli assault against Iran’s nuclear reactor, the television drama is animated by botched elements of basic spycraft, ill-advised romantic entanglements, and a mental chess game between the opposing intelligence agency chiefs. Most of the dialogue is in Farsi, with snippets in Hebrew and English. and international release on Apple TV+ is set for Sept. Much of Tehran’s appeal in Israel was in its flouting of stereotypes about life in a strict Islamic society. Molding the mixture spiced with cardamom into perfect koofteh, or Persian meatballs, Rabinyan bonds over the family recipe with her deeply conflicted aunt and inadvertently exposes herself to scrutiny from the Iranian secret police, who have been tracking her from the day she landed at Imam Khomeini International Airport disguised as a flight attendant. That visceral connection comes across in Tehran during a kitchen scene when the Israeli spy, returning to her birthplace, confidently scoops luscious handfuls of minced lamb, scallions, rice, and mint leaves from a bowl. Even today, as the two countries regard each other as mortal enemies, about 10,000 Jews live in Iran as an officially protected minority, down from 80,000 in the 1940s. Some 140,000 Israelis trace their roots to Iran, including an ex-president, a former army chief of staff, and a small constellation of pop stars. Of all the improbable plot twists that captivated Israelis this summer through the series’s eight episodes on the Israeli Public Broadcasting network, finding sanctuary with a long-lost Iranian relative may have been the most plausible. Answering the door with a look of haunted shock is her old Aunt Arezoo, who had stayed behind in Tehran with a Muslim husband when the rest of her Jewish family fled the country decades before. Chased in the Israeli television thriller Tehran through the Iranian capital’s gritty alleys and markets, the young agent ducks into a safe house that her bosses in Tel Aviv know nothing about. When the Mossad spy and computer hacker Tamar Rabinyan slips into Iran on a mission to help demolish its nuclear program, she’s on familiar ground.
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