Talk about timely. National Geographic Channel hit the jackpot scheduling tonight's big documentary premiere.
Iran and the West (Monday 9-11 p.m. ET, NatGeo) arrives with the middle eastern nation still topping the news nearly two weeks after a presidential election that remains the source of fierce dispute and contentious street protest.
Don't expect up-to-the-minute updates from NatGeo. But you can expect a put-it-all-in-context look back through the last three tumultuous decades culminating in the current tension between Tehran and a western world led by Washington, D.C.
Iran and the West gives new focus to the crucial overthrow of the Shah through the rise of Islamic clerics, the taking of American hostages, and the impact of both on the 1980 American presidential election. Defeated President Jimmy Carter is among those interviewed, along with former secretaries of state (George Shultz, Madeleine Albright) and other key American figures.
But NatGeo gets both sides (actually, the BBC does, since this documentary is an acquired import) -- including interviews with Iran insiders like former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami.
There's much more to be learned, too, about the intervening years, including the brutal Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and the subsequent rise of Islamic extremist terror. Which takes us up to now. Which can be seen taking shape in news reports from today's again tumultuous Iran.
Other cablers are turning their eyes to Iran, too. HBO2 is in the midst of a documentary trilogy focused on the country, led this week by the premiere of Be Like Others(Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET, HBO2), an unexpected look at Iranian transsexuals living under strict Islamic law.
Still airing is The Queen and I (Monday night at 2:40 a.m. ET, June 29 at 3 p.m. ET, HBO2), where a proud Iranian revolutionary filmmaker strikes up an unlikely friendship with the glamorous widow of the deposed Shah. First up was Letters to the President (now available via digital cable's HBO On Demand), a portrait of ever-controversial leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.