Z/Web

I don’t often write about TV series, but I believe if they are done properly, they can be better than films. That’s because shows have more time to develop the storyline and they can be more complicated, similar to a really thick novel. Showtime’s original series Homeland is vastly better than most films.

I knew nothing about it as I wasn’t a subscriber to the channel. I’d heard the name of the show last fall when it came out, but that was about it. I vaguely remember hearing that the critics were praising it and more recently — after watching the first episode — I heard it won a bunch of awards. I’m not surprised. It is a fantastic show. I caught the first episode during a Showtime “free weekend” and I loved it so much I bought a subscription to the channel. If you know miser me who hates monthly fees, that’s impressive.

The premise of the show is brilliantly simple. An American CIA analyst, Carrie Mathison (played by the perfectly cast Claire Danes in her best role ever), gets intelligence that an American POW has been “turned” (brainwashed into becoming a traitor). She doesn’t know what to do with this info until suddenly an American soldier, Nicholas Brody, is discovered in a hole in the ground in the Middle East. Carrie is convinced that Brody (awesomely played by Damian Lewis) is the turned POW and is going to carry out a terrorist attack in the U.S. Brody comes back to the States and is celebrated a hero, but his home life is chaotic. He’s a changed man: gone for eight years, tortured and kept in isolation, he’s not exactly stable, and after so much time away, his children don’t know him and he learns his wife has been sleeping with his best friend. But is his strangeness due to his traumatic experience or is he a spy? Even more intriguing, we learn that analyst Carrie has a history of mental problems (she needs drugs to stay stable), so we begin to wonder if she’s insane or brilliant. There’s plenty of setup here for amazing drama, tension, and spy games.

Now with a binary “is he or isn’t he” premise like that, this struck me as an intriguing but ultimately shortlived show. After all, how long can they milk the suspense of Brody’s guilt or innocence? But wow, does this show do it! No spoilers, but not only does the show manage to carry on the premise throughout this first season, but it sets itself up brilliantly for a second season (something I couldn’t figure out they were going to do). Most importantly, it does this in a way that’s utterly logical and believable: nothing is forced or artificial.

In fact, that’s a key thing about this entire show that I loved: it’s one of the truest portrays of politics and spy craft that I’ve ever seen. For example, in most spy movies, the spy is doing things like infiltrating the enemy or sneaking in to steal information or something. While there’s a little bit of that here — surveillance and trailing and snooping — this show is much more about doing things like blackmailing shifty characters into cooperating with the government, or interrogating suspects in clever ways to get information from them. It’s realistic, too: the information obtained isn’t obviously important, like the location of a bomb, but it is tiny and almost trivial — perhaps just the fact that two people know each other — and top analysts can extract clues from that to figure out the big picture.

Other than one scene (out of hundreds) that felt off to me, the entire first season was nearly flawless. Most TV shows, even great ones, have a few dud episodes or a few moments that don’t quite work. This one did not. I watched every minute of every episode with my hands clenched and my breath held. It’s just amazing drama. With every episode I kept thinking “they can’t do this again next time” and yet they did. What’s awesome, though, is that every episode feels incredibly satisfying. This is not like most shows — say Alcatraz — that tease you with information but don’t really pay out much of the story. In Homeland things actually happen and the show progresses by a large amount in every episode — and yet the next one has just as much drama and twists and turns. It’s just amazing.

You have to watch this show. It’s grim, gritty, messy like real-life, the performances are fantastic, and the the story is just stunning. Apparently the show’s based on an Israeli TV series, Prisoners of War, and while I have no idea how good that show is or how similar this one is, I can imagine how that would work (POW returning to Israel and not knowing if the soldier has been turned or not). I can’t wait for more of this show, though I suppose season two won’t out until next fall. I’m not sure I can wait that long. I’m still trembling from watching all these episodes (I watched the last five non-stop) and I feel like going back and watching the entire series again from the beginning. I can’t think of any TV show that’s ever made me want to do that (there are some I like to watch more than once, but not immediately after watching the whole series).