Homeland, season three.

I’ve joined the chorus of complaints about season three of Homeland since September, which is in large part a reaction to how amazing the first season was, but also how far the show has shifted not just in direction but in theme since that point. Tonight’s season-ender had more of the usual nonsense – absurd plotting and convenient coincidences that required more suspension of disbelief than a Uri Geller show – about which you should all feel free to rant in the comments.

I have one specific thought that made me want to weigh in after watching tonight’s show. For me, Homeland didn’t go off the rails this year, neither at the beginning nor in episode four when the first Big Reveal took place. I think the fundamental shift in the show took place in the middle of season two, when the writers chose to go from a show about facing an ill-defined, largely unknown, inbound threat to U.S. security to a show about outbound activities like attempting an internal coup d’état inside one of our strongest enemies. That sea change necessitated two adjustments in the direction of the show, both of worked very strongly against its success and defied what made the first season so compelling:

• It altered the tenor of the tension of each episode, reducing it while also narrowing its scope. In season one, the threat was global: The U.S. is going to be attacked, at some point, by unknown persons, and it could be massive in scale. During season two, the threat to the U.S. was diminished – nearly all of the season was devoted to smaller matters like chasing down individual suspects, with the eventual attack coming more or less out of nowhere. Season three was entirely about individual tension – first with Carrie appearing to be a prisoner of the CIA, then later with the attempt to engineer that internal coup within Iran’s security apparatus. Characters we know were placed in physical jeopardy, or saw their careers placed on the line, but the country was never at risk.

• When the protagonists were facing an inbound threat, we the audience were kept in the dark because the protagonists were in the dark themselves. In season three, with no inbound threat and only the outbound effort to bait, catch, and recruit a critical asset from Iran, the protagonists knew more than the writers could tell the audience, resulting in the massive unreliable-narrator arc at the start of the season but continuing through the next nine episodes. It got to the point where I trusted nothing that I saw; if Brody had done a double twist off that crane and stuck the landing in the season finale it wouldn’t have surprised me. The only way to create the tension the writers wanted was to hide, mislead, and lie. I was okay with it once. I was not okay with a full season of it.

The other fundamental problem with season three, for me, dated back to a problem I had in season one, something that I doubt is universal but started to detract seriously from the viewing experience in season two: I never cared about the relationship between Brody and Carrie. It seemed improbable and forced at the start, and eventually devolved into farce. Carrie becoming pregnant with his baby – really, neither of them thought about birth control? – read like a desperate attempt to infuse life and interest into a relationship that, for me, was nothing but a distraction from the cloak and dagger stuff that made season one click.

I won’t go into all of the plot holes and inconsistencies, as Alan Sepinwall has done that already. I don’t entirely agree with Alan’s sentiment that there shouldn’t have been a second season, but I agree that the way it was handled was less than ideal, and a once-great show has lost its way, to the point where season four is going to have to entice a lot of viewers, myself included, back.

This is pretty much always true, but just in case: Anything is fair game in the comments below, including spoilers and comments on stuff I didn’t mention. I’m curious to hear what others thought about tonight’s episode and the season as a whole.

Homeland, season two.

If you missed it, my analysis of the R.A. Dickey trade is up for Insiders. There will be a podcast on Thursday and I’ll chat that afternoon at 3 pm Eastern.

Season two of Homeland turned out to be very different from season one in plot, tone, and pacing, to the point where it felt for much of the middle of the year like a different show featuring the same characters. (Perhaps not quite to this extent, but you get the idea.) I tend to agree with Alan Sepinwall’s* take that Homeland redeemed itself with a strong finale that got at least most of the way back to the domestic-terrorism angle of the first season, but I think it didn’t move far enough away from the doomed-romance storyline that threatened to take over so much of the season and even occupied too much of the first half of the finale.

* I should mention that Alan’s got a new book out, The Revolution Was Televised, on twelve TV dramas that changed the genre. I haven’t read it, because I’ve only watched one complete series (The Wire) he discussed, but I love Alan’s work and will recommend the book on that basis alone.

I’ve never really bought the Carrie/Brody romance as a deep emotional connection. I get how two very broken people might find solace in each other, and I suppose we’re supposed to infer there’s physical chemistry between these two (I don’t see it – Jess and Mike look like they want to jump each others’ bones when they’re in the same room, but Carrie and Brody’s intimacy seems forced). What I don’t get is how these two broken people are really in love, unless they’re pretending they are, including deluding themselves right down to their comments at the end of the show that they were “so close.” They really should never be that close again, not if the show wants to regain the realism that characterized the first season but was all too absent from the second. And if, as Sepinwall suggests, Brody is largely absent from season three while the focus shifts to the rebuilding of the CIA with Carrie working on the side to clear Brody’s name, I don’t think that’s a bad thing for the show at all.

The loss of realism in season two was coupled with a massive uptick in its pacing. Where season one was slow and methodical, with the CIA team often a step behind the terrorists and making (by TV standards) painstaking progress in their investigations, season two absolutely flew by, with Bigger Moments and faster plot twists. We’re not in network procedural territory here, but the tension from the first season’s lack of story churning was a great part of its appeal to me, reminiscent of British series that aren’t afraid to make the viewer wait for a big payoff. I think season two was far less realistic right up to the finale’s biggest twist, where no one seems to notice that an SUV is parked in the middle of the Langley campus, something that would have likely spurred an evacuation of adjacent buildings and an immediate assumption that the vehicle was rigged. (As for who moved the car, assuming it’s a character we’ve already seen, my money remains on Galvez, whom the writers seem to have been setting up since the middle of the first season as the mole, including his presence at and survival of the Gettysburg assault.)

You can also count me among the fans who didn’t care for the Dana/Finn hit-and-run storyline, which became largely an excuse for Morgan Saylor to do that thing with her sleeves more often than before. Sepinwall’s post mortem with the show’s producers indicates that this subplot was going somewhere else but never got there, which showed in the finished product. It played out like an afterthought, with its only value a modest addition to the venality we’d already seen from Walden.

Aside from three very strong season-long performances from Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin – the latter probably getting better material for Emmy submission time this year – season two’s other main strength was in exploring the complicated entanglement between Brody and Abu Nazir, from the former’s inability to fully sever his ties to the terrorist mastermind to the latter’s presumed willingness to die to set up the cataclysmic attack of the season finale. I also credit the producers for turning the page on Nazir after two seasons, yet doing so in a way that doesn’t leave the viewers with much closure. He’s dead, but his organization seems to be living on, and his spectre will inhabit the grounds of the decimated CIA for years. Simply catching the bad guy can’t end the threat, because that’s not how the world works, and setting off the emotional catharsis of watching Abu Nazir die against the reality that the threat against us survives the death of one man was one of the best-plotted elements of the season.

What I’d like to see from season three is a devolution from the romantic elements, including the Carrie/Brody relationship and the Brody/Jess/Mike triangle, back towards the tense spy-story themes of season one. That first season was constantly infused with doubt about Brody’s actual intentions and how far he’d get with the plans handed to him, along side his difficulty in readjusting to civilian life. His character has been poisoned by the events of the finale for the time being, to the point where, if he appears anywhere on the show again, he’ll have to be arrested and thrown in that same prison where Eileen Morgan was held. I can’t see him becoming a central character again unless his name is cleared, and that process should take a full season or more. If the show turned away from him entirely, I’d certainly miss Lewis’ outstanding performances, but it might be better for the show in the long run, much as The Wire turned away from Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell to introduce new antagonists for the investigators to chase. If the star-crossed lovers story takes over more of the next season, however, there’s a good chance I’ll tune out of the show entirely, because that’s so far removed from the reasons Homeland hooked me in the first place.

If you haven’t gotten into Homeland at all, I strongly recommend season one, even if my review here sort of turned you off on season two. That first twelve-episode arc ranks among the best single seasons I’ve seen of any show, in large part because it eschews the rapid-fire pacing of most American dramas and builds tension through more organic means.

Homeland.

I’ll give the series Homeland, which just took four of the five major Emmy Awards for dramatic series on Sunday, the highest praise I can: For the first time ever, I’m now a Showtime subscriber, because I didn’t want to miss season two when it starts on September 30th.

Homeland, adapted from a ten-episode Israeli series called Prisoners of War, follows the return of a POW, long presumed dead, from eight years of captivity in Iraq as he readjusts to normal life and finds himself held up as a hero and used as a political pawn by the current Adminstration … all while a rogue CIA analyst believes that the soldier is actually a terrorist sleeper sent to the U.S. to carry out a major attack. The first season’s twelve episodes dance on the edge of implausibility but rarely cross it, with brilliant pacing that belies how much of the series’ action is happening in something approximating real time.

Claire Danes, playing the CIA analyst Carrie Mathisen, is the series’ ostensible star, but while her performance playing an obsessed workaholic who is hiding her bipolar disorder from her colleagues was superb, I thought Damian Lewis, as the former POW Nicholas Brody, was even more deserving of the postseason award. The viewer knows from the first moment on which side Carrie sits, but Lewis has to spend much of the season bobbing and weaving to keep his true intentions hidden from the viewer and, to some extent, from other characters. Lewis is practically asked to play three or four separate characters, if you include flashback scenes to his captivity as well as the different faces he shows to colleagues, to his family, and to Carrie. Danes’ performance might not have won if not for the difficulty level of the final two episodes of the season, although she was incredibly convincing as the just-barely-hinged obsessed analyst who is absolutely sure that there’s an imminent attack but can’t quite convince anyone in a position to do something about it. Mandy Patinkin is also superb as Carrie’s closest ally within the CIA, while Morena Baccarin, playing Brody’s wife, is gorgeous with or without her top on and I suppose she’s a pretty good actress too. (Obligatory Firefly plug here, from when Baccarin had long hair.)

Where Homeland succeeds most is in bringing realism to unreality: The basic premise is, at least so far, a fiction, an American soldier who might have been turned by Islamist terrorists and who is intent on causing harm to his own country. Moving forward from this starting point, however, the writers kept the series grounded with mostly realistic, or at least plausible, depictions of the the various plot threads, including Brody’s difficulty readjusting and the CIA often being a day late and a dollar short when trying to chase people who don’t want to be found. Absent are the mindless midday shootouts on urban streets present in most network police procedurals. Absent is the uberhacker who takes a few seconds to “break through the firewall” and cracks non-alphanumeric passwords with a few keystrokes. I don’t know exactly how the CIA operates, but at least I never thought that Homeland was insulting my intelligence with shortcuts and misused jargon just to move the plot along. And by making the possible antagonist a white American male, the series forces viewers to confront some of their own biases, even subconscious ones, where the subject is Islamist-based terrorism.

The series did slip into implausibility, for me, with the extent of the personal interactions between Carrie and Brody, a relationship that evolves very strangely over the course of the season, although there is a plot payoff to all of that in the season’s final two episodes. But I was more disturbed by the treatment of Carrie’s bipolarity as a critical plot point, especially that without her medication, she becomes an insane savant, barely capable of rational thought. It wasn’t even clear to me why the character needed to be bipolar, or needed to be shown going off her meds, to advance the overall plot, and I don’t like seeing mental illness trivialized through fictional depictions that show sufferers as cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

The season finale wrapped up many of the outstanding questions – I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who haven’t seen it – but left enough plot points open to create suspense for the second season. There is still a plot afoot at the end of the finale, although I won’t say how or why. We still don’t know who the leak within the government is, a detail I expect to see resurface in the second season. And some of the backstory remains untold; I still felt like the motivation for the threatened attack felt incomplete and am somewhat anticipating more flashbacks that fill in those blanks for the audience. This kind of episode-to-episode or season-to-season suspense was completely lacking for me in the first seasons of both Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire, two critically-lauded series that many of you love but that couldn’t hold my attention into their second seasons. To create suspense without forcing viiewers to suspend their disbelief is a rare skill for writers in any medium, but Homeland does so, making it, in my opinion, the best dramatic series currently on American TV.