Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ghosts Of Beirut’ On Showtime, Where The Mastermind Behind The 1980s Car Bombings in Lebanon Is Found In 2007

Sometimes you just can’t make a particular part of history into a spy thriller. The narrative is too complex, with moral ambiguities on both sides. Good guys and bad guys are needed for the drama to work. A new spy thriller that centers around the Lebanese Civil War of the 1980s suffers from this exact problem.

GHOSTS OF BEIRUT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A series of black SUVs drive down a desert road. “SOUTHERN IRAQ. JANUARY 20, 2007.”

The Gist: The soldiers, in US Army uniforms, are actually terrorists; they drive into the base there, shoot two soldiers and abduct two more.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Could be plot-wise, could be tone wise, but what vibes does this show give off. CIA agent Lena Asayran (Dina Shihabi) gets the call about the attack; she gets intel that the kidnappers are trying to get into Iran but are being blocked, and she recognizes a Lebanese accent in the video of the attackers. She goes out to where the vehicles are spotted and sees the two soldiers are dead.

She knows that this is the work of Imad Mughniyeh (Hisham Suliman), aka Radwan and a number of other names. This is a man the American government has been looking for for 25 years. She questions Iran’s deputy defense minister Ali-Reza Asgari (Navid Negahban), who is not only an informant, but he recruited Imad 25 years prior.

In 1982 Beirut, constantly under attack by the Israelis, a young Asgari (Omar Lotfi) spots a 19-year-old Imad (Amir Khoury) standing up to soldiers looking for a shakedown. They tell him that he has “friends” across the Middle East, and they know about his activities; they want him and whoever he recruits to visit a camp they’re setting up in the Bekaa Valley. He tells the Iranians that he knows where the Israeli bases are in Lebanon and he wants to give them “a taste of their own medicine.”

Back in Langley, CIA Agent Robert Ames (Dermot Mulroney) has a plan to get the Israelis out of Lebanon, negotiate a peace treaty, and ultimately create a two-state solution with the PLO. Director William Casey (Ned Bellamy) trusts Ames, but the others he proposes this solution to aren’t sure. Senior operations officer Dewey Claridge (Billy Smith) calls the plan “dangerously naïve.” In private, Ames tells Casey that two Iranians close to the Ayatollah are setting up a training camp in Lebanon.

As Ames goes to Beirut to get both the Palestinians and the Israelis on board with this peace plan, Imad, his brother and his brother-in-law go to the camp. Asgari and his counterpart train the ragtag revolutionaries with Imad’s help and the stash of weapons Yasser Arafat left to him when the PLO pulled out. The weapons are dodgy and the recruits are not exactly elite soldiers.

By September, after the new Lebanese president and thousands of refugees are killed by the Israelis, Imad has another plan: Recruit people to drive bombs into Israeli bases and set them off. He recruits his first driver, whose whole family was killed by Israeli air strikes, and tells him he’ll be a martyr and a hero. When the first one, at an Israeli base in Tyre, kills a couple of dozen soldiers, a new movement has begun, called Islamic Jihad.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of?: Ghosts of Beirut is if you took a show like Homeland and based it on real events.

Our Take: Ghosts of Beirut is a bit of an odd show. Created by Lior Raz, Avi Issacharoff and Greg Barker, it claims to be a fictional account of the 1980s bombing and occupation of Lebanon and how the CIA finally caught up to Imad Mughniyeh in 2008, but based on deep research. But the four-part series also includes interludes where interviews with reporters and officials that covered or were involved in the conflict to give the audience context. But the situation in Lebanon in the early 1980s was so murky to begin with, even these strange interludes don’t give the audience the context it needs to figure out what’s actually going on.

Look up the Lebanese Civil War and you’ll see that at certain points, Israel, Iran, Syria, the PLO and the US were all involved in some capacity, either trying to keep the peace or fighting on one side or the other, in order to either further their positions or protect themselves from who was fighting for the opposition. Loyalties often shifted, and the reasons for the involvement of the various outside players wasn’t always clear.

Ghosts Of Beirut tries to focus in on Imad Mughniyeh, because he was responsible for the car bombings that, among other places, took out the U.S. Embassy (killing Ames in the process), and the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing hundreds of soldiers; he was also responsible for the kidnapping and killing of William Buckley, who took over for Ames. But even focusing in on Mughniyeh doesn’t really help the narrative of why the Iranians recruited him to begin with, why Israel was occupying parts of the country, and just what the hell the U.S. was doing in this conflict in the first place.

Even if you were alive during this whole era — as a news-watching teenager at the time, we remember all of this well — the details of the civil war and who was fighting on which side were murky. There were really no good guys and bad guys here, and that moral ambiguity made things even more confusing to us civilians watching this unfold on our TVs. Ghosts Of Beirut tries to boil down this sprawling conflict and finds it impossible, leading to a confusing narrative for viewers, whether they were around during that time or not.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After a briefing, Ames hears a car driving quickly outside the walls of the embassy; he starts to run but there’s an explosion behind him.

Sleeper Star: Hiba Bennanoi plays Mughniyeh’s wife Saada, who rightfully demands to know why her husband is out all the time, why he has a stash of weapons, and why he was in Tyre when the the first car bomb went off.

Most Pilot-y Line: “To a new Middle East,” Ames says during a toast at a reception in Beirut. Unfortunately, Claridge might have been right on that front.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Ghosts Of Beirut tries to take the exceedingly complex Lebanese Civil War and tries to make it into a good-guys-bad-guys spy thriller, but fails to do so simply because that time in history can’t be boiled down so easily.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.