One unfair dismissal is all it takes to send an idealistic professor spiraling into a world he never planned to enter in Babil, a Turkish drama about how quickly a stable life can come apart.
What is Babil (The Choice) about?
Irfan is introduced as a man who has built his identity around principle: a professor who believes in doing things the right way, even when the right way costs him. That belief collides head-on with reality when he is dismissed from his position under circumstances he considers deeply unjust, at the exact moment his sick son needs him to be stable and present. With one door closing after another and his usual options running out, Irfan finds himself pulled into a much darker set of circumstances than he ever imagined navigating, forced to make choices that put his sense of who he is under real pressure. Babil follows that unraveling closely, tracking how a person who prized fairness and order gets pushed, decision by decision, into a world governed by neither. The series is less interested in a single dramatic turn than in the accumulation of smaller compromises — the ones a desperate parent justifies to themselves one at a time. Around Irfan, a web of other characters with their own stakes in his choices complicates every step he takes toward trying to protect his son.
About the cast
Halit Ergenç leads the series as Irfan, carrying the weight of a man trying to hold his family together while his professional life collapses. Ozan Güven, Nur Fettahoglu, Aslı Enver, and Birce Akalay fill out the ensemble surrounding him, with Mesut Akusta and Beren Kasımoğulları rounding out a cast built around the pressures closing in on Irfan from multiple directions.
Context & significance
Babil, released in 2020 and known internationally as The Choice, belongs to a strand of Turkish drama that trades melodrama for a slower, more procedural look at how ordinary people get pulled toward extraordinary decisions. Director Uluç Bayraktar keeps the storytelling grounded in Irfan's perspective, using his professional world and his home life as two pressure points that squeeze from opposite directions throughout the series.
Watching Babil (The Choice) on Ktime
Babil streams on K-Time with Persian subtitles, letting viewers follow every layer of Irfan's story in its original language while reading along in Farsi. Browsing the page requires no login at all, and watching the series is as simple as signing in with a free K-Time account, part of a platform built specifically around Farsi-first streaming for Persian-speaking audiences.