Claire Danes in Homeland. Image courtesy of Showtime.
When Homeland premiered in 2011 it was a sensation - critics and audiences loved it, and it won a slew of awards for its first two seasons. Apparently, America was primed for a show where Claire Danes, Damian Lewis and Mandy Patinkin play a tense game of game of cat and mouse against the backdrop of the War on Terror. I didn’t watch it at the time, but I remember circa 2011-2012 everyone was talking about it.
Well, turns out I didn’t miss much and the show’s popularity once again proves that there is no accounting for taste. Homeland is about an American POW (Damian Lewis) captured by al-Qaeda who is freed in a military operation and returns to the US a war hero. A hot shot analyst at the CIA, Claire Danes, suspects that he is a double agent working for his former captors to pull off a terrorist attack. The first season leaves you guessing about whether Lewis is actually a double agent, or just a poor sap suffering from PTSD after being beaten and tortured for years. The show creates several inflection points where either interpretation could be true, holding back answers in order to ratchet up the tension, as you would expect from any well constructed dramatic narrative.
The question of whether Sergeant Brody has been turned or not is answered by the end of the first season, and later seasons are fueled by increasingly ridiculous plot twists because if there is one thing that America knows how to do, it is take a hit and squeeze the life out of it beyond all reasonable limits. But the first season left me cold. It’s just not that good, and I fail to see why Homeland garnered all the hype that it did.
The problems are myriad, but they probably start with the show basically being America’s War on Terror for Dummies. It uses broadly drawn caricatures of terrorists and regional dynamics as tinder for a ragingly paranoid story about foreign infiltration of the American homeland. And indeed, this makes a bit more sense when you realize it is based on an Israeli show, Prisoners of War. Because few if any other countries indulge in America’s habit of running a single good idea into the ground, the Israeli show ran for two seasons, basically until it was done telling the story it wanted to tell. And that story is about elite commandos who come back from Lebanon and how the experience changed them, and about the doubts and fears kindled by their long stay deep in enemy territory.
The American version takes that idea and uses it to exploit our own fear of foreigners, although it rather obviously includes a few white people in the terrorist conspiracy in order to inoculate itself against charges of racism or stereotyping. But the bottom line is that the show feeds off the deeply held American fear of foreign infiltration, and it commodified this xenophobia in order to make nearly a decade worth of soapy, pulp drama for television. There’s little subtly or nuance in the show’s depiction of the War on Terror, and it has nothing of particular interest to say about it. Mainly, the first season is wrapped up in Brody’s journey, and it’s just not all that interesting to watch a depressed guy fumble his way back into society. I also think that Morena Baccarin was badly miscast as his wife. That relationship is meant to be the emotional backbone of Homeland, and I just couldn’t possibly have cared any less about it.
But there’s another really bad part of this show, which is Claire Danes as hot shot CIA spook Carrie Mathison. Carrie is depicted as very talented, but also very psychologically fragile. Her need for anti-psychotic medication becomes an important plot point, and her tendency to spin out of control into paranoia and weird impulsive behavior is basically her character’s defining feature. Later on, as the series became progressively worse, the writers decided that Carrie’s character needed a pregnancy, because of course she did.
There is nothing redeeming about the character choices made here. Why does she have to be a neurotic wreck spinning out of control? And Claire Danes, who I am a fan of in general, really hams it up in the role. I found the performance borderline unwatchable, and again it leans into all these pretty crappy cliches and stereotypes. This is just not a very smart or deep show. It is skin-deep at best, embracing the most obvious and irritating stereotypes about mental illness, war and politics and spinning them up into a dime-store version of a spy thriller that American audiences gobbled up like dog food.
Was there a receptive audience for this kind of thing? Yes. And they are probably the same people who turned out in droves to see American Sniper. Homeland does its best to cloak this paranoid fantasy in the trappings of a tense psychological thriller, and to some extent that works - but not as often as it should, thanks to extremely poor choices of casting and characterization. As Homeland prepares to air its eighth and hopefully final season, which pretty much everyone agrees is just schlock at this point, I think it’s important that we as a nation come together and acknowledge that the show was never good from the very beginning.
