Directed by Youssef Marzouq and written by Mohamed Gamal El-Din Raafat, Al-Khatem Al-Masy (The Diamond Ring, 1961) is regarded as the first crime series in the history of Egyptian television, established in 1960. In 1963, the genre gained in popularity when Nour El-Demerdash made Hareb min Al-Ayam (Fugitive of the Days), with a script by Faisal Nada based on a novel by Tharwat Abaza.
Crime stories were the focus of suspense thriller makers until screenwriter Saleh Morsi and director Yehia El Alami made the espionage series Dumou Fi Oyoun Waqiha (Tears in Bold Eyes, 1980), starring Adel Imam and based on Egyptian General Intelligence files. They followed up with Raafat Al-Haggan (1988), a huge, three-season hit starring Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz, also based on previously classified information. Both played on patriotic sentiments notwithstanding the 1979 peace agreement between Egypt and Israel and the push for normalisation.
More recently espionage drama has focused instead on the war on terrorism, with the antagonist being unnamed foreign rather than Israeli intelligence. This year in Al-Aaedoun (The Returnees), screenwriter Baher Dewidar and director Ahmed Galal draw on General Intelligence files in which officers gathered information about Islamic State (IS). The main characters are the officer Omar (Amir Karara), his superior Nabil (Mahmoud Abdel-Moghni) and his IT colleague Nadin (Amina Khalil). There is a human dimension to the character evident from the first episode. Nadine’s mother (Safaa Al-Toukhi), who is suffering from a terminal illness, dies at the end of the episode, leaving her father (Mohamed Hassib) so depressed he will not talk to anyone. Omar must take care of his daughter for a week since his divorcee is going to Dubai for work, while Nabil’s wife is desperate to have a child as the couple suffer from a fertility issue. All three characters must leave their families for a risky operation.
In the first two episodes the script follows Hussien or Abu-Mosaab (Mohamed Farrag), a deputy of the IS security commander’s planted by Egyptian intelligence many years before. When he informs Omar of a planned operation he is exposed and burned alive, but another exposed undercover agent successfully escapes. Every couple of episodes a new adventure comes up, with the overall plot line looking thinner and thinner though the general theme is how to deal with IS violating Egyptian national security. Although the first and the second episodes were very promising, the flow of the drama and the suspense is not moving the way it should be. Perhaps this is because the series has two purposes at the same time: to create a traditional suspense-action drama and to draw the public’s attention to the great effort of the intelligence and the security forces to eliminate terrorist activities in Egypt.
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Over the past two years, director Peter Mimi’s TV series Al-Ikhtiar (The Choice) kept gaining momentum. The first season, written by Baher Dewidar, framed its hero-villian story in a classic drama format with the story of two military officers. One is a commander in Egypt’s special forces in northern Sinai killed in an ambush made by the terrorist Islamic Jihaists at Al-Barth village near Rafah in 2017. The other is deserter who joins first Ansar Beit Al-Maqdes in Sinai and Libya, where he forms his own Al Qaeda-affiliate Al-Mourabitoun before being executed in 2020. The second season, The Choice: The Shadow Men, written by Hani Sarhan, focused on the challenges the police faced while securing Egypt after the ouster of Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) following the nation-wide protests of 30 June on 3 July 2013.
This year, The Choice: The Decision – also by Sarhan – returns to the last few months before Morsi’s ouster to document different arenas of life in Egypt and give a broader view of what led to the military decision to end MB rule. Before the opening credits, a few shots depicting the last few minutes before the declaration of 3 July hint at the subject. The drama is multilayered. One layer concerns ordinary people such as Mahmoud (Mahmoud El-Bezzawi), an old and disciplined government employee who is passed over for a promotion in favour of a less expert colleague who happens to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Maurice (Nour Mahmoud), a Christian pharmacist who faces the aggression of an extremist customer while refusing to give in to the desire of his wife Irine (Samar Morsi) to emigrate now that the MB are in power.
The second layer, perhaps the main part of the drama, concerns National Security officer Zakaria Younis (Karim Abdel-Aziz) following the terrorist group known as Madinat Nasr Cell, the Military Intelligence officer Mustafa (Ahmed Al-Saqqa) investigating terrorist activities in Sinai, and the General Intelligence officer Marwan (Ahmed Ezz) intercepting a cargo of weaponry arriving by ship. All three cases seem to lead to the MB leadership. At first sight the fact that all three officers happen to be old friends feels forced, but the screenwriter adds plenty of human detail as he did in the last season. Mustafa’s wife is suffering from a rare, life-threatening condition. Marwan’s father, a judge, is also ill, while Marwan himself is interested in a girl named Basma (Mirna Nour El-Din) with a view to marrying her. Zakaria, for his part, keeps visiting the family of his informer – who was murdered by the terrorists – in order to help them. He also visits Ali (Mohamed Abu-Dawoud), a former major general in National Security who was dismissed following interference from the MB.
The third layer concerns what is happening at the highest level, with discussions between Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi (Ahmed Bedier) and Major General Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi (Yasser Galal), or between the newly appointed defence minister Al-Sisi and Major General Abbas Kamel (Gamal Solieman). The series also depicts the members of the Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Office like the supreme guide Mohamed Badie (Abdel-Aziz Makhyoon) along with figures such Mohamed Morsi (Sabry Fawwaz), Khairat El-Shater (Khaled El-Sawy), Mahmoud Ezzat (Magdi Said), Saad Al-Katatni (Bayoumi Fouad) and Mohamed Al-Beltagy (Hesham Ismail). While the acting in the first and second layers is fair, it is less so in the third, since that requires imitating characters from real life, though El-Sawy and Makhyoon invented their own versions of Al-Shater or Badie. The script covers such events as the Rafah Massacre of 5 August 2012, Al-Shater’s decision to give Mohamed Morsi the legitimacy to discharge Defence Minister Tantawi, and the Al-Ittihadiya protest in December 2012, in which peaceful protesters including journalist Al-Husseini Abu-Dief were killed.
Besides his talent in action direction, Mimi uses a documentary technique in almost every episode, ending it with real footage of political meetings that involved members of the MB. Such footage helps to explain some of the MBs true intentions to exercise complete control over Egyptian politics. In one episode Morsi is seen with Al-Sisi and Tantawi in the latter’s office at the Defence Ministry after the presidential elections of 2012, in which Morsi seemed to be warning the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) of serious consequences on the streets should there be “a change in the results of the election”. This footage has not been shown before regardless of the fact that most Egyptians know how the MB threatened Supreme Council of Armed Forces at that time.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 April, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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