Apple TV+’s new spy thriller, the Israeli but Iran-set Tehran, is as much about the human cost of espionage as it is about the thrills of infiltration. The latter is represented in an exciting early scene in the pilot, when a chador-clad woman, whose heavily made-up eyes are the only features we can see of her, enters a bathroom stall at the Tehran airport, trades outfits with the flight attendant waiting for her there and exits into the city, an enemy of the country she’s just crossed into. Mossad agent Tamar (Niv Sultan) never hears what her Iranian counterpart — electric company employee Zhila, whose identity she’ll assume — says of her defection: “I’d rather die than stay here.Tehran Season 1-2 Download.
When it debuted earlier this summer on Israel’s Kan 11 network (and was made available on the channel’s website with Farsi subtitles), Tehran was accused by some pro-regime hardliners of being anti-Iranian propaganda. (Just as reliably, their more liberal compatriots grumbled that the series was too sympathetic to officials in the Iranian intelligence agencies.) As the split reactions suggest, creators Moshe Zonder (a Fauda alum), Dana Eden and Maor Kohn aim for a more humanist vision — one in which ordinary Iranians are caught between their own repressive government and foreign culprits, cruelty between Israel and Iran only begets more cruelty, and the dividing lines between the two countries, however hawkishly enforced, are more political than actual.
Though it’s set in two countries, alternates between English, Hebrew and Farsi and boasts a sprawling cast, Tehran is so immersive and narratively orderly that it’s almost impossible to get lost. With bandages covering her nose (the implication of a recent cosmetic procedure hiding the small facial differences between herself and Zhila), Tamar wastes no time before attempting to hack into the electric grid. But it’s not long until she decides to cut loose her brutally pragmatic handler, Masoud (Navid Negahban), opting instead to seek refuge in strangers (Esti Yerushalmi, Shervin Alenabi) who have their own reasons for risking the retaliatory ire of the authorities.