‘Unconditional’ Shows How Social Media Won’t Save Us

Apple TV faced online blowback last month when it confirmed that it would be streaming the Israeli mystery thriller series Unconditional. Social media objected because it’s an Israeli show and social media is biased against Israel. Apple TV can be excused for being unprepared for the response. After all, nothing happened to the last Israeli show it aired. It had gone to the trouble of recruiting Hugh Laurie for the third season of Tehran, which aired on Israeli TV way back in 2024. Apple TV then sat on it for all of 2025 due to fears of bad press, and released it stateside in January this year to decent viewer numbers and no coordinated social media response from Russia, Iran, or America.

The irony of this comparison only intensifies when you look at what these shows are actually about. Tehran is, as the title suggests, an espionage thriller about how evil Iran is, with all the unsubtle and uncomfortable political implications you’d expect from that, given recent events. Unconditional, by contrast, started out in its first week and two episodes as a seemingly straightforward ripped-from-the-headlines style story: “Russia imprisons innocent foreigners on trumped up drug charges.” The mother of the innocent foreigner has “unconditional” love for her daughter, of course. But by episode three, things become somewhat conditional in the plot. Surprising revelations strongly imply that those drug charges weren’t quite as trumped up as they look, from the naive mother’s perspective anyway.

Gali (Talia Lynne Ronn) is a 25-year-old Israeli woman on holiday in India with her her 43-year-old mother Orna (Liraz Chamami). When they change planes in Moscow, Gali is arrested at the airport for drug smuggling while Orna tries, but inevitably fails, to release her daughter through the Russian legal system. What’s surprising about this set-up is how civilized it seems: The Russian civil servants are polite. Whether for reasons of plot or verisimilitude, the Russian legal system moves rather quickly, certainly faster than the American equivalent. Gali soon receives a hearing where she seems likely to prevail, right up until a cryptic whisper from the prosecutor to the judge results in her being locked up indefinitely.

In the second episode, Orna starts a social media campaign in Israel to call for her daughter’s release, essentially pressuring the Israeli government to intervene diplomatically on her daughter’s behalf. The process takes several weeks to gain momentum, but it seems to work as the foreign ministry promises to help Orna. Then it gets weird when certain people, for unknown reasons, try to sabotage the campaign. Gali was not a complete victim, as it turns out.

Is Gali even innocent at all? At its most interesting moments, Unconditional deliberately plays with the idea that Gali might be a genuinely sinister character. While Gali may present as a heroic Israeli soldier sweetheart, her adjacency to the military, foreign countries, criminal gangs, and the international drug trade all suggest a cryptic duplicity. The show flirts with the possibility that the Israeli government is mainly concerned with covering up whatever criminal activity Gali was involved in, suggesting a possible Fort Bragg style situation where the heroic narrative of “the noble soldier” becomes a shield behind which said soldiers can commit crimes with impunity.

Unfortunately, Unconditional does eventually have to make up its mind about whether Gali is innocent and whether the Israeli government is complicit in whatever it was she was doing, and without getting too spoilery (bear in mind the full show is already out in Israel) the solution to the mystery ends up featuring characters who are almost comically malevolent and thuggish. In a twisted sense, the social media campaign against Apple had a point, putting yourself on a scale with Putin and Russia means you are already judging yourself against the villains.

In terms of television drama, there’s nothing all that remarkable about Unconditional. It’s certainly not a bad show — indeed, it’s an enjoyable watch — but it’s the same basic “loved one leads a secret life” story you might see on Lifetime, just with classier production values. The main interesting hook is that, in stark contrast to a show like Tehran, a critical part of the premise in Unconditional is the tacit acknowledgment that even from an Israeli perspective, being in the IDF does not make Gali an inherently sympathetic character. Her position as an Israeli soldier doesn’t even necessarily imply Gali is capable of loyalty to anyone or anything aside from her own immediate self-interest.

Emphasis on “soldier,” not “Israeli.” Little if any of the premise really requires that the show take place in Israel at all, and I should note again, while Apple TV licensed Unconditional for international release, this show was originally intended for a domestic Israeli audience. So in the end I can’t say that I’m all that surprised that Unconditional comes down on the side of, yes, Israel is bad, but Russia is worse. It’s just a particular extension of the Israeli critical theory of “yorim v’bochim” — shooting and crying — killing people then making films about feeling bad.

Freedom of expression and effectiveness of social pressure is why Israel works as a democratic stand-in for America or any western country here. America’s own tradition of shoot-and-cry films, for example, are most evident in its array of Vietnam movies. In this show, the Israeli government is susceptible to being pressured by a normal citizen like Orna via a sufficiently determined public relations campaign. Such an idea would be preposterous in Russia or Iran where protesters are slaughtered. The irony of Unconditional and many other shows like it is the acknowledgement that Orna’s hopeful vision of her daughter’s innocent life and good behavior to others is probably wishful thinking. Still, being a jerk on a personal level is no reason to be put in prison, and there are layers of context to her misdeeds and allegiances that affect how badly we think of Gali.

Though hardly revolutionary in its larger narrative and political approach, Unconditional does at least make an effort to understand how bad guys think. That the parallel between Israel and Russia lasts as long as it does is an open acknowledgment that both countries — and maybe any developed country — can present illicit opportunities and bureaucratic nightmares, depending on what you’re trying to do. Unfortunately, that’s where the similarities end, and the meaningful self-reflection mostly collapses.