'Tehran' returns for a third season among other streaming favorites to watch

It’s hard to imagine a show better suited to the current moment than Tehran, the series about the Mossad super-agent, Tamar Rabinyan (Niv Sultan) who goes undercover in the Iranian capital to wreak havoc on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Now it’s coming back for its third season on KAN 11 on December 9 and eventually on Apple TV+. 

Not much has been revealed about this new season, but it does star Hugh Laurie of House as a nuclear regulatory investigator, and knowing this series, I wouldn’t sell his character a life-insurance policy – but this is just a guess, not a spoiler. He is taking over the designated foreigner role, which was filled by Glenn Close as a British psychologist married to an Iranian in the previous season.

Another addition to the cast this season will be Sasson Gabay, playing an experienced Mossad agent. Sultan can currently be seen on the big screen as a young ultra-Orthodox woman trying to find a husband in Matchmaking 2.

‘Broken Wings’ – Netflix

Netflix has just released another Israeli movie with English titles, Broken Wings (2002) by Nir Bergman. Bergman just won the Best Director award at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival for his latest film, Pink Lady, and Broken Wings was his first full-length film. 

One of the first hit Israeli movies of the 21st century, it heralded in a new era of quality filmmaking here. It’s a drama about a family coping with the trauma of losing their father suddenly, and it won awards all over the world at a time when few Israeli films were shown abroad.

Broken Wings features a stunning breakthrough performance by Maya Maron as the teenage daughter who is forced to care for her younger siblings while her mother (Orly Silbersatz) works shifts as a nurse. The title refers in part to the glittery wings worn by Maron’s character, a costume for her performance as a singer in a band, and there is something truly angelic that shines through her character in this carefully observed story.

‘A Man on the Inside’ – Netflix

Sometimes you want to go where nobody knows your name – that could be the tagline for the charming new Netflix series A Man on the Inside, starring Ted Danson. He became a star as the bar owner on Cheers and recently was in the series The Good Place. 

Danson is his charming self here as Charles, a retired, recently widowed engineering professor in the San Francisco bay area who gets recruited by a private investigator to go undercover to a retirement home to find out who has been stealing from the residents. It’s a remake of a Chilean documentary that tells the same basic story, although the new series has more time to go into Charles’s backstory and the romantic entanglements when he joins the community. 

The series also goes into the story of his daughter, who fears she has failed as a parent by raising kids glued to their phones.

But the main focus is Charles and the other members of the community, who have a stunning view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Their assisted-living facility is quite lavish compared to any typical one, but the goal is fun, not realism. 

Among Charles’s new neighbors are characters played by Sally Struthers of All in the Family and Margaret Avery of The Color Purple. One thing the series really gets right is how it revitalizes Charles to be engaged in some kind of meaningful work again. It also features classic rock tunes like Jackson Browne’s “For a Dancer,” which are truly the kind of music his generation grew up on.

‘Say Nothing’ – Disney+

There’s a lot to say about Say Nothing, the new series currently available on Disney+. Based on the bestselling book of the same name by Patrick Radden Keefe, it focuses on the worst period of the conflict in Northern Ireland, starting in the early-mid 1970s and spanning several decades. This conflict took thousands of lives in a slow-burn of bombings, beatings, and murders. 

The series is told on two parallel tracks: one about Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew), a young woman from a pro-Irish Republican Army family who finds herself gradually being drawn into the conflict, and a second about Jeane McConville (Judith Roddy), a widowed mother of 10 who was taken from her home by masked IRA members in 1972 and whose fate remained a mystery for over 30 years.

There is a framing device as a researcher decades after the events unfold interviews the surviving participants. Petticrew gives a fine performance as a bright, headstrong girl who plans to go to university and who believes at first in non-violent peace marches to try to bring Irish rule to Northern Ireland. Her father, who served eight years in a British prison for pro-Republican activities, and her aunt, who was horribly deformed making a bomb, ridicule her and her sister for their peace activities. 

While marching in the countryside, Dolours is beaten to within an inch of her life by a club-wielding Protestant militia member. After she is saved by a policeman, her mother, who is involved in the IRA women’s auxiliary movement, asks her, “Why didn’t you fight back?”

It’s scenes like this that give you an idea of how ingrained this centuries-old conflict is in the lives of Northern Ireland’s residents, a conflict that inspired James Joyce to move to Switzerland at a young age, saying, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Gerry Adams (Josh Finan), the leader of the IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein, is an important character and is shown to be the mastermind behind much of the worst of the violence, although each episode features a disclaimer saying he denies any involvement in the IRA’s armed wing. 

It’s an interesting disclaimer – one that I don’t ever recall seeing before – and indicates that Adams, who went into politics and helped broker the 1998 truce, admits that what the IRA did was illegal and that he does not want to be associated with it. But disclaimer or not, he was clearly a major player. The series has drawn criticism in England for portraying the IRA members too sympathetically, but it’s still interesting.

‘The Wizard of Oz’ - Apple TV+

Now that Wicked has been released, you can watch the movie that inspired it, The Wizard of Oz, on Apple TV+. Recent articles have pointed to the fact that the iconic song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” – written by two Jews born to immigrant families, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen (born Hyman Arluck) – was intended as a Zionist anthem. The “land over the rainbow” was Israel and the dream that really did come true was the aspiration of Jews to return to this land. 

Either way, it’s a beautiful song, hauntingly sung by Judy Garland. The whole film has an intense dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish quality. While young children may love much of it, there are some very intense and scary scenes, so use your judgment when watching it with them.