What the Israeli Show “Tehran” Means to This Iranian

Israel’s TV boom continues apace. Fans all over the world, most of whom are neither Israeli nor even Jewish, are binging Fauda, Shtisel, The Spy, and other shows that now populate the most popular streaming websites. As an American immigrant from Iran, I’ve taken a special interest in Tehran, an Israeli series that tells the story of a Mossad agent deployed to the country of my birth in order to sabotage its nuclear-weapons program.

Tehran stars the Israeli actress Niv Sultan as the covert agent Tamar Rabinyan; over its two seasons viewers are embedded with Tamar on her mission. Through her eyes, we meet local sources and support networks, recruit and turn potential traitors, escape detection, assess the nodes of authority and tactical vulnerabilities of the Iranian elite, and experience both the technical capacities and bureaucratic limitations of fellow agents back at headquarters.

The show has everything one could want from the genre: suspense, plot twists, a compelling hero, fully realized characters, sophisticated spycraft, and just enough verisimilitude to give the audience the sense that it is learning how the Mossad actually operates. But besides the episode-to-episode mystery of how Tamar will manage to fulfill her mission and whether Iranian counterintelligence agents will catch up with her, a different sort of mystery is unraveled for the viewers: that of Iran itself, a country most foreigners—especially Israelis—dare not visit. It is also a mystery for Tamar, who was born there but left as a child and is discovering it alongside the audience.