I cannot think of a more stressful viewing experience than Tehran (Apple TV+), a thriller so hectic it makes Homeland look like one of those ambient noise apps that send you off to sleep. The first season saw Tamar (Niv Sultan), an Israeli Mossad hacker/agent with an Iranian family background, going undercover in Tehran in order to facilitate airstrikes on a nuclear power plant. There was a lot of double-crossing, a lot of shooting, and an awful lot of stress. It ended in fairly disastrous fashion, leaving plenty of options open for what could happen next. All-out war? More subterfuge? Either way, it was unlikely to be relaxing.
We join Tamar and her Iranian collaborator Milad (Shervin Alenabi) hiding out in Tehran, two months after the first season’s finale and after all the betrayals it unleashed upon the key players on each side. The old mission is in limbo and must be wrapped up, and Tamar, who has been left adrift, must figure out how to extract herself. But this is not a repeat of season one, and a new mission is to be established. I briefly hoped that, for those of us of a nervous disposition, the new mission might involve manoeuvring Mossad and the Revolutionary Guard towards a cup of tea and a nice lie down. Instead, it involves prisons, hospitals, break-ins and break-outs, secret services, people-smuggling, newly appointed government officials, family members in various states of compromise and, in what looks like a display of Apple TV+’s confidence in the international appeal of the series, a brand new star in the form of Glenn Close.
