Strong Recommend: Tehran (Apple TV+)

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Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Welcome to Strong Message here, Strong Recommend, our cultural recommendations and a look at their impact on language.

I'm Helen Lewis.

And I'm Amanda Yunuchi.

And what have you brought for us today?

TV series.

A streaming series, I think you and I call them, or Apple, tehran is it about the iranian city it's about what it is is a very very good

drama about

the israeli spy service mossad and the iranian spy service it's an israeli made production but what i like about it is rather like in john a carry novels a lot of effort has gone into making both sides very human so it's not an us against them we're the goodies they're the baddies.

It's about the complexities of having a job, doing what you do, involving having to, you know, do terrible things or do certain things to your enemy, as it were.

But at the same time, you have a family, you fear for their safety.

It's in Persian, Hebrew, and English.

So there's absolutely, again, no concessions made to making it simple and straight.

You know, you'd think it wasn't a commercially driven show.

It's all about authenticity and the sort of gritty reality of what this is like.

Now, I have to say that.

I really like that about it being in different languages.

One of the things I most liked about Shogun, the TV series, the most recent version of it, rather than the 70s one, is that the majority of it, the dialogue, was in Japanese.

And it's about an English pilot, Anjin, who ends up stranded in Japan in the middle of these big epic wars.

But because it's all in Japanese, you get some sense of the fact that he is, you know, he really can't communicate with people.

And they also, the fact that they think he's sort of kind of some hairy, barbarous lump, basically.

But I I think there is something political about that use of language, isn't it?

If you'd made that all in Hebrew, it would be very much saying, here is the point.

We're telling this from the point of view of the Mossad.

Exactly.

And for that very reason, there is no deliberate identification of who the heroes are and who the enemies are.

They're all basically people caught up in this mess, but trying to get on with their professional job, well, at the same time,

trying to live their lives.

And I have to say, there are two series now that have been up on Apple.

I think a third series has been made and has been transmitted elsewhere, but it's being held up because, of course, all these shows were shot before

the October the 7th attacks and the ongoing disaster in Gaza.

So I think the programme makers are waiting to see what happens before they put the next one out.

But I know our fourth series has been commissioned, but I would strongly recommend the two series that are up on Apple.

Again, for the very reason you were talking about the use of language.

It's the first time I've watched something that's actually allowed me to see a much more authentic portrayal of what life, daily life in Tehran is like and the complexity of it.

What I didn't realize is the whole history of a large Jewish community being in Iran.

And so there's a large Jewish population there.

This is the power of drama.

You know, we talked about, we looked at things like, you know, the post office crisis, complex, forgotten about until it turned into drama.

Dramas, if done well, do really bring us into areas which we otherwise are just, we just rely on newspaper headlines for to get our sense of what that life is like.

But I also think, given that Israel is such a contentious subject, sometimes the best critical appraisal of it comes from within the country itself, because there isn't a kind of the sort of tension and dancing around it that I think outsiders often feel.

I'm thinking that the Heretz newspaper is often intensely critical of the Israeli government without obviously the overtones of worrying that they're kind of being inherently anti-Semitic.

There's an Israeli journalist called Ronan Bergman wrote a history of Mossad called Rise and Kill First, which is all about the formation of basically saying we're this very small country under threat from all sides, so we need to kind of be very aggressive and crazy and make people afraid of us and think they don't know what we're going to do next as a deliberate tactic to keep Israel safe.

And I thought that would have been an incredibly contentious thing for somebody outside the country to say.

But guess what?

He's got loads of people from Mossad, from its foundation onwards, saying it overtly, openly.

The amount of people he's interviewed and got on the record is extraordinary.

The most public critic of Netanyahu and the Israeli military operations at the moment in Gaza is an ex-prime minister.

Yeah.

Olmer.

I think it's really worth, and I think drama can do this in a way that

doesn't get anyone's kind of hackles up instantly and they don't immediately dismiss it from being the other side.

It's giving you that kind of bath.

Not the tepid bath of manager Klein, but the bath of just going, this is what the situation is like.

This is what you would see if you were in these people's shoes.

Exactly.

There's a thriller I read by an ex-I think an ex-CIA operative David McCluskey set in Damascus under Assad called Damascus Station, which has that similar attempt to show both sides equally in terms of their humanity and believability and your concern for them, while at the same time they have to go about their business, whether under pressure from the Assad regime or from America.

involving assassinations and kidnapping and so on.

I also like this thing we've had in the last couple of years of kind of revisionist histories of spy services.

I think, I mean, you mentioned the carrion.

I wonder if it starts with him, the kind of move away from the James Bond, it's super glamorous, they, you know, things, to this kind of sense of like, oh, it's middle managers bumbling through, which I think reaches its apotheosis with Mick Herron's Slow Horses series, which I absolutely love, in which the premise of which is that Britain is sort of crumbling and terrible, and MI5 and MI6 don't really know what they're doing, and sometimes they need people to do kind of grubby things for them.

Yeah, I suppose Spy Who Came In from the Cold was so successful because it was the first spy novel

to counter that whole image of glamour and efficiency and so on.

And yet, despite the bureaucracy behind it that's portrayed, you know, people do die.

That's the, you know, the stakes are still very, very high.

I would also, by the way, recommend for a more up-to-date look at what's happening is the documentary Gaza, Doctors Under Attack, which the BBC, for some reason, felt it couldn't show, but is now up on Channel 4 and on the Channel 4 player and is an extraordinary moving portrayal from Inside Gaza of medics trying to survive while hospitals all around them are crumbling.

Well, there we go.

We have a suite of recommendations this week, but our principal one is Tehran, which is available on Apple TV.

We will be back with another recommendation next week, but for the moment, please subscribe on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com