RUSH: Well, now, look, I’ve got some people asking me about this TV show I recommended, The Honourable Woman. Let me just say a couple things about it, because if you’re gonna go watch it I don’t want you to be confused by the way I’ve set it up. Oftentimes you can have a program recommended to you and expectations are created and you watch it and you end up being disappointed by it because the person that told you about it blew it. And I don’t want to blow it for you.

It’s a great spy series, eight episodes, one season, one season only. It’s from 2014, BBC. It is about a woman who sees her father, a Jewish mega-powerful industrialist, killed right in front of her at the lunch table in a fashionable place. Her brother is there. He’s stabbed to death by an angry Arab or Palestinian or what have you. Bleeds out, you see it all. She has a brother. He runs the company. It’s a mega-industrial company, and he runs it for seven years, but we don’t know much about that when the program starts because the program starts with her running the business.

Nessa Stein is the lead character’s name played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. And her intention is to promote conciliation between the Israelis and Palestinians by not taking a side either way. I mean, it’s classic. She’s a good person. She wants her company to thrive. She wants her company to be responsible for the two sides getting along. She’s under no illusions she can solve it. That’s not what she’s trying to do, but she doesn’t want to be a problem. So her company is in the process of laying fiberoptic cable from the West Bank to the Palestinian Authorities for the purpose of increasing access to the World Wide Web and worldwide communications to downtrodden Palestinians. And she is undermined every step of the way although she doesn’t know it.

Now, I’m starting to get into spoiler territory here, when I told you that ultimately the program concludes that no matter what happens it’s all futile, that is true. But it’s a great fictional story. This woman who does everything in the world to be fair, gets sabotaged by both sides. In this program, the United States president is working behind the scenes to create a Palestinian state, undermining Israel and undermining this company and undermining MI6, and interestingly it happens from the secretary of state’s office, who is, in this show, a woman. But it’s not about her. The program is about the woman that runs this giant conglomerate.

It’s a good show, that’s all. And it chooses as its subject matter the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I watched it for liberal bias. I watched it for conservative bias. Okay, is somebody preaching to me here? I mean, it aired originally on the Sundance channel, uh-oh. Something on the Sundance channel, Moscow west. Robert Redford and all that. But it’s pretty fair. It’s not one-sided by any stretch of the imagination, and there’s not a good guy or bad guy here in terms of the sides. They’re both bad and they’re both good, depending on the people involved.

But it’s one of these, if you have all the episodes you’ll binge watch it, my guess is, if you like spy intrigue. It’s kind of slow and plodding. There’s a lot of flashbacks when you get into future episodes, so if you’re watching something the first two episodes, it doesn’t makes sense, be patient, it will all be explained in a later episode.