#The incident 1967 cast series#

As history, “The Spy” is enlightening as story, it needed more.

But Baron Cohen, an actor who elsewhere has demonstrated an uncanny ability to illuminate new angles on even the most intractable of conflicts, can’t make them feel more interesting than they are, or get us to know Eli the way the running time of “The Spy” would need to demand.

#The incident 1967 cast series#

(Recent limited series, including HBO’s “Chernobyl” and Netflix’s own “When They See Us,” have more gracefully brought their true-life stories in for a landing - aided, of course, by characters for whom we deeply felt.) But too little, to the point the series ends, has been shown of any side of Eli other than a yes/no conflict between duty to nation and duty to spouse. An elderly Jewish couple (Jack Gilford and Thelma Ritter), two young soldiers on leave (Beau Bridges & Robert Bannard). We get domestic drama executed at a level we’ve seen many times before instead rather than the high-level spyjinks that come along all too rarely.īy the time it reaches its endpoint, a viewer will feel that they’ve been told a great deal - including, in a series-ending set of chyrons, a bit of history the show might have found a way to more interestingly dramatize. “The Spy,” whose central character has submerged his identity, yes, but is also a master of crafting new ones, is too doleful by half the point that Eli’s wife has been abandoned in pursuit of the mission is a valuable one, but one that seems emphasized often at the expense of simple curiosity about what a spy is or does. But that comparison emphasizes that which “The Spy” lacks: A degree of verve or spice in telling a story with meaningful historical valence but also, close to its center, adventure. While this series’ creator, Gideon Raff, is best known for “Prisoners of War,” the Israeli program that inspired “Homeland,” it feels more apropos to invoke “The Americans,” a show that shares not merely “The Spy’s” interest in the interplay of tradecraft and personal relationships but also a bit of casting Noah Emmerich assumes a new accent to play Eli’s handler. Soon enough, he’s at the height of the Syrian power apparatus, having sacrificed whatever was his self in the name of gathering intel.

Naturally charismatic and a bit blank, Eli melts into the job, even as it distances him further and further from his wife (Hadar Ratzon Rotem). In the first feature distributed by Megan Ellison’s Annapurna, the Hurt Locker director trains her eye on the 1967 Detroit riots through the lens of an incident in the annex of the Algiers. Baron Cohen plays the real-life former Mossad agent Eli Cohen, who is recruited to go undercover in Syria to uncover their martial plans against hated neighbor Israel.