So You Think You Can Make A Show About Assad

FX’s new series Tyrant is about the Americanized son of a brutal Arab dictator who returns home for a family wedding and ends up having to stay to run the country. With a premise like that, how could they go wrong? Let’s start with the bad casting:

The problems begin with Adam Rayner, who plays the show’s protagonist, Bassam “Barry” Al Fayeed. After fleeing Abbudin—the fictional country standing in for pre-civil war Syria or Saddam-era Iraq—as a teenager, Bassam has made a life as a pediatrician in Pasadena, trying to forget that his father once used chemical weapons against his own people. After years of estrangement, he reluctantly brings his wife Molly (Jennifer Finnigan) and two children to Abbudin for the first time to attend his nephew’s wedding. (For some reason, Bassam’s wife doesn’t understand why her husband might have a complicated relationship with his war criminal father, and is hoping the two might reconnect.) Bassam is horrified by his family’s corruption and secretly afraid he is no better than them. The role requires an actor who can show the potential for brutality beneath his righteous outrage. Rayner mostly just glowers.

This is particularly disappointing because Rayner is a white, English actor cast in an Arab role. The producers’ claims that they couldn’t find an Arab actor with the skills to carry a show would be easier to forgive if Adam Rayner was giving a Bryan Cranston–level performance. Instead, he’s just a pretty white guy in a suit, easily overshadowed by the (actually Middle-Eastern) actors around him.

Poniewozik gets to the heart of the problem:

There’s not a fleshed-out character in the show, beginning with Barry’s stock-villainous brother Jamal (Ashraf Barhom), who we immediately meet raping a subject with her own husband and children still in her house. To a person, the characters are types: the shallow American kids, the dissolute playboys, the noble protesters and journalists, the cynical advisers, sneering elites and sad-eyed children. The problem isn’t that Tyrant portrays a troubled region as troubled; it’s that it doesn’t use its time to begin to make this world as real as ours.

Eric Deggans also faults the show for trading in stereotypes:

This is a show about the Middle East as seen through Americanized eyes, with little of the nuances in Arab or Muslim culture on display. The unfortunate effect is a constant, not-so-subtle message: If these people would just act like Americans, everything would be so much better. Piled on top of this simplistic dynamic is a series of decisions made by the characters that seem utterly baffling. …

In fact, even though the country is teetering on edge of rebellion during many episodes, no one in Bassam’s immediate family acts as if he is worried about his own safety. And when they arrive in Abbudin, they seem to know almost nothing about the country — as if at least one of them wouldn’t have hopped on Google to read up a little on this dictatorship ruled by their relatives.

Alyssa pans the show as well:

“Tyrant” feels less like an act of powerful imagination and more like the recreation of a Generic Middle East (it was shot in Tel Aviv), where everyone is oppressed, except the tacky gluttons who are blowing their money in nightclubs. Everyone speaks in cliches, whether they are defending their right to Dom Perignon or talking about winning over survivors of the regime’s gas attacks or overseas audiences.

And the show, in keeping with the long-running television vogue for explaining repulsive people, veers towards moral relativism. Having established Jamal as a serial rapist, it is genuinely bizarre that “Tyrant” spends subsequent episodes worrying about his sexual health. It is nice that a prep-school aged Barry was horrified by his father’s use of chemical weapons, but against tens of thousands dead, are we really supposed to be this concerned with his feelings?