The dish

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.

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