Aboul Fotouh, decided to take the president at his word. el-Sisi spoke about the show, Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer representing Mr. So it was with Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a former Brotherhood leader and presidential candidate who was arrested in 2018 and convicted in March of holding secret meetings with the group. 1, with political opponents routinely accused of Brotherhood ties and anyone with Brotherhood sympathies vulnerable to firing, blacklisting or detention under terrorism charges. Morsi collapsed and died in a Cairo courtroom in 2019.īut the Brotherhood has remained the Sisi government’s enemy No. But it has also attracted widespread mockery on social media, where users skewer its heavy-handed propaganda.įor viewers who lived through this history less than a decade ago, the season’s ending is no mystery. “The Choice” has been viewed widely, attracting many fans for its compelling dramatizations and the leaked historical videos.
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Morsi’s in one episode, rejecting his invitation to join the Brotherhood, a leader must be “a nationalist, and that is all.”Įgyptians look forward all year long to the Ramadan shows, watching the new episode of a hit series after breaking the fast nightly is a decades-old tradition. “Whether it be a president, an army commander, or any other position,” Mr. el-Sisi is religious - but that his brand of Islam, unlike Mr. The show is careful to emphasize that Mr. The actor who portrays him, Yasser Galal, has nailed his mannerisms, viewers say, down to his soft-spoken voice. el-Sisi is shown as a humble family man, measured and cool under pressure.
Morsi and other Brotherhood figures are portrayed as shifty schemers, their movements accompanied by ominous music. “It is a narration of a part of Egypt’s history that we witnessed with our own eyes or was recounted by others who lived through these events.” “This series is based on true events, with some names and places changed,” reads a showrunners’ note that appears onscreen at the beginning of Season 3. Fadl and other critics said, executives from the government production company have intensified their supervision, ordering up show subjects and story lines. He now runs a YouTube show about the Egyptian entertainment industry.
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Fadl, the screenwriter, left Cairo for New York in 2014 after his work on a TV show highly critical of abuses by the security forces left him blackballed. “The fact that there’s such centralized control over the media in Egypt means they have the ability to control the producers, the actors, the writers, every stage of the production to produce exactly the story they would like to tell about themselves,” said Joey Shea, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute specializing in Egypt. Artists who did not embrace the government line were smeared as Brotherhood sympathizers in state-linked media or prevented from working in Egypt again.
Corrupt and abusive cops no longer feature in the scripts military heroes and daring spies have taken their place. Since 2017, however, a company owned by the state security services has monopolized the airwaves, taking control of production companies, TV channels and news outlets and putting other production companies out of business.Įpisodes of different shows are sent directly to security officials for review, according to industry insiders. el-Sisi as defense minister, seized power, massacring nearly 1,000 people on a single day in August 2013 at a sit-in by pro-Morsi demonstrators to protest the military takeover. With millions of Egyptians calling for his ouster, the army, then led by Mr. The Islamist group’s candidate won Egypt’s first democratic presidential election in 2012, after the country’s longtime dictator, Hosni Mubarak, was overthrown amid mass protests in the Arab Spring uprising of 2011.īut Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood’s president, proved deeply divisive, his truncated term marked by upheaval. el-Sisi is the hero of “The Choice,” its villain is the Muslim Brotherhood. It blends fiction with what it presents as fact, splicing never-before-seen clips of key historical figures, apparently recorded by Egyptian intelligence in secret, into each episode. el-Sisi’s rise to power and is being shown only in Egypt, not the wider Middle East.
The third season covers the events surrounding Mr. The first season of “The Choice” told the true story of a special forces officer battling a jihadist and the second dealt with counterterrorism. “In war, you must use any weapon you have, and now they have drama as a weapon.” “The real enemy for the Egyptian state now is anybody who stands against the state,” said Belal Fadl, a prominent Egyptian screenwriter who is critical of the show.