Is AppleTV’s Tehran the new Fauda?

If you love Fauda — and of course you do — you’re in for a long wait for season four, which isn’t due to arrive on Netflix till 2022. That’s why I had such high hopes for Tehran, which is written by one of Fauda’s co-authors Moshe Zonder. What, after all, could there possibly be not to like about a hot female Mossad agent struggling to survive after a botched mission in the hostile Iranian capital, where all Israelis are seen as emissaries of ‘Little Satan’?

It starts promisingly, once you’ve got over the technical difficulties of signing up to Apple TV. (For some reason, my characters now speak with English subtitles but in German. The other options it gives me are all the Latin languages but not English. I’ve settled on German because it’s the least intrusive.) You’re straight in there: a Jordanian jet is forced to make an emergency landing in Tehran with some rather nervous passengers aboard.

Two of them are comic relief: a flaky, panicky couple of twentysomething Israeli tourists, one extravagantly gay, who only flew this route because it was going to get them to India for half the price of a less risky route — and are now in fear of their lives because everyone knows what Iranians do to Israelis. The other is our computer hacker heroine Tamar Rabinyan (Niv Sultan), who is on a vital undercover mission to help the Israeli airforce take out some kind of military facility.

Disguised behind a hijab, Tamar is going to exchange identities with a local woman waiting for her in the airport toilets. The local woman — who works at the electrical facility Tamar is going to sabotage — will take her place on the plane when it resumes its journey, while Tamar will use her tech skills to disable the anti-aircraft defences surrounding the target.

Then various things go wrong, in ways I shan’t disclose for plot-not-ruining reasons.