From reading the first few reviews on IMDb and the low ratings here, I can only imagine the raters/reviewers were either the wrong audience for this show (they expected fictional high-stakes Homeland) or didn't grasp what they were watching was a version of an Israeli-Palestinian-Lebanese reality that has a highly-contested, multifaceted, and many-charactered plot.
It is a complex story, too many events, too many characters that cannot all be explored in depth, too much backstory that cannot be all explained in 4hrs. Real life is complex. Trying to boil it down to simple terms and singular titular characters reduces it to a caricature of itself - I'm glad Ghosts of Beirut hasn't done that so far.
So far having only watched episode 1 (more to come), I'm excited to see more. The characters feel real. The Arabic and Hebrew spoken are real. The main characters are very well known in the middle-east and the political circles everywhere else.
All I can say is that I'm pleasantly surprised that this show is made, that we can get complex stories on TV that don't try to dumb things down.
Shout by BenVIP 2BlockedParent2023-05-23T22:00:39Z
From reading the first few reviews on IMDb and the low ratings here, I can only imagine the raters/reviewers were either the wrong audience for this show (they expected fictional high-stakes Homeland) or didn't grasp what they were watching was a version of an Israeli-Palestinian-Lebanese reality that has a highly-contested, multifaceted, and many-charactered plot.
It is a complex story, too many events, too many characters that cannot all be explored in depth, too much backstory that cannot be all explained in 4hrs. Real life is complex. Trying to boil it down to simple terms and singular titular characters reduces it to a caricature of itself - I'm glad Ghosts of Beirut hasn't done that so far.
So far having only watched episode 1 (more to come), I'm excited to see more. The characters feel real. The Arabic and Hebrew spoken are real. The main characters are very well known in the middle-east and the political circles everywhere else.
All I can say is that I'm pleasantly surprised that this show is made, that we can get complex stories on TV that don't try to dumb things down.