The 1979 Iranian Revolution and the three decades of confrontation that followed it are the subject of this three-part BBC series from producer Norma Percy, built almost entirely from interviews with the people who lived the events: former Iranian presidents, Western foreign ministers, negotiators, and intelligence officials speaking on camera about decisions made in private. The first episode covers Ayatollah Khomeini's rise, the Lebanon hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq War, and Khomeini's death, closing as the 1991 Gulf War reshapes the region. Later episodes track the nuclear standoff with the West alongside the regional upheavals surrounding it: the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan, the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the September 11 attacks, and the Iraq War, all of which alter Iran's calculations toward Washington and Europe. Rather than narrating from the outside, the series lets participants describe their own reasoning and misjudgments, producing an account of back-channel diplomacy and brinkmanship as remembered by the officials who conducted it, with the nuclear question left open at the point the series ends.