In the grand tradition of men doing bad things for good reasons, we meet Adam, a Lebanese craftsman whose medium is not clay or paint, but the United States one-hundred-dollar bill. He is a counterfeiter, an artist of the illicit, whose talents are a generational inheritance.
This skill, a source of past ruin, is called out of retirement by the most universally persuasive forces: sickness and debt. With a daughter whose heart is failing and a father succumbing to his own maladies, Adam is squeezed back into the criminal world he sought to escape.
His mission is a curious form of artistic pursuit—to replicate the perfect Franklin, a bill so flawless it represents a simulacrum indistinguishable from the real thing. This is the setup for a thriller that places its protagonist in the vice grip of morality, a man whose love for his family is measured in meticulously forged currency under the watchful eyes of very dangerous men.
A Blueprint with Missing Pages
The series presents its plot as a complex network of obligations and betrayals, a tangled knot that promises a satisfying unraveling. Adam finds himself pinned between two separate crime lords, Al-Hashem and Edward, each with their own demands, histories, and threats.
This scenario is complicated immeasurably by the return of Yulia, his former partner in both romance and finance, whose reappearance signals that the past is very much an active predator in the present. The entire narrative edifice, however, is built upon a history of slights and backstabbings that we are told happened but are rarely shown.
The storytelling employs a kind of aggressive shorthand, jumping through time and space while leaving the viewer to assemble the psychological IKEA furniture without the instructions. It presumes an audience willing to do the heavy lifting of filling in motivational gaps and backstory blanks, essentially acting as uncredited co-writers.
There is a persistent sensation that we have walked into the second act of a much longer story, armed with only a vague, verbal summary of what came before. Why was Adam’s father betrayed? What was the precise nature of the schism between Adam and Yulia?
The show gestures toward these questions but seems almost allergic to answering them, creating a frustrating experience of narrative archaeology. The foundation feels unstable because so many of its foundational stones are simply not there.
The Beautiful, Empty Shell
Visually, Franklin is impeccable, a testament to what a modern television budget can achieve. The cinematography captures a gritty, rain-slicked moodiness that feels right for the genre, rendering its world in a palette of deep shadows and anxious, often neon-tinged, light.
The production itself has a polished sheen; this is a show that certainly looks expensive and feels weighty in its aesthetic. A tense, percussive score and detailed sound design work in tandem to manufacture an atmosphere of constant peril, making even a simple conversation feel fraught with danger.
Ambitious action sequences, including a set of high-speed car chases, are executed with technical competence. They look dangerous. They feel kinetic.
And yet, they are strangely forgettable moments after they conclude. This is the central paradox of the series: the aesthetic and the action are a spectacular container with very little inside. The visual style promises a depth that the story cannot provide, and the thrilling set pieces feel weightless because our investment in the people involved is paper-thin.
When a car flips or a shootout erupts, we observe it as a technical exercise, not a moment of character jeopardy. The style is present, but it is detached from the story’s non-existent emotional core. It is a striking facade, meticulously constructed, but a knock on the door reveals no one is home.
Actors Adrift in a Sea of Plot
The cast, led by Mohamad Al Ahmad as Adam and Daniella Rahme as Yulia, approaches the material with a seriousness it seldom earns. They are professionals, carrying themselves with a gravity befitting a more profound drama, and a flicker of genuine chemistry between the two leads suggests what might have been possible with a more substantial script.
Adam’s character, however, is a frustrating archetype. His motivation is a single, blaring note—love for his daughter—and the script provides no other harmonies. We get no sense of his internal life, his artistic pride in his illicit craft, or the psychological toll of his choices. He is a man defined entirely by one external pressure, leaving his personality a blank slate.
Yulia fares little better, often appearing as a mechanism to advance the plot rather than a person with her own agency or comprehensible desires. Other characters, like the police officer Zein, languish on the sidelines for most of the runtime before being suddenly elevated to pivotal importance, a promotion for which the narrative has done no prep work.
The performers are left to navigate a story that gives them situations to react to but not characters to inhabit. They are capable actors, searching for emotional truth in a story that is only interested in its own convoluted, and ultimately hollow, mechanics.
Franklin is a Lebanese crime-thriller mini-series that premiered globally on May 15, 2025, exclusively on Netflix.
Full Credits
Director: Hussien El Menbawy
Writers: Cherine Khoury
Cast: Daniella Rahme, Mohamad Al-Ahmad, Toni Issa, Youssef Haddad, Pierre Dagher, Fayez Kazak, Georges Chalhoub, Wissam Saliba, Sandybelle Khachab
The Review
Franklin Season 1
Franklin is a visually polished production with a committed cast, but these strengths cannot salvage a narrative that is both convoluted and emotionally vacant. It stands as a frustrating example of style over substance, where an interesting premise is undone by a script that leaves its characters underdeveloped and its audience confused. It is a hollow shell, beautiful to look at but ultimately unsatisfying.
PROS
- Impressive cinematography and moody atmosphere.
- High production values.
- Professional and capable performances from the cast.
CONS
- Disjointed and confusing narrative structure.
- Underdeveloped characters lacking depth.
- Action sequences lack emotional impact.
- A weak script that fails its premise and its actors.
