Jace Lacob talks to the creators of 'Homeland' about the legacy of '24,' terror, and blue-eyed extremists.
There is no room for argument: Showtime's provocative and gut-wrenching psychological thriller Homeland is the best new show of the season.
Revolving around two very unreliable narrators engaged in a series of riveting mind games, Homeland explores an America 10 years after 9/11, surveying the damage done to both the national psyche and the central protagonists. Claire Danes plays Carrie Mathison, a CIA operative with both a mental illness and a troubling sense of personal guilt that she missed crucial intelligence prior to the Sept. 11 attacks; Damian Lewis (Life) plays soldier Nicholas Brody, a prisoner of war who returns home to a family that long thought him dead, and who may or may not have been turned into an enemy of the state during his eight-year captivity in Iraq.
The ratings for Homeland (Sundays at 10 p.m.), which aired its seventh episode (out of 12) this week, have sharply increased since the show launched in early October; if you look at its average audience on all platforms (4.1 million total viewers), Homeland becomes Showtime's most successful freshman show ever. Loosely based on the Israeli series Prisoners of War, Homeland has already been renewed for a second season, amid nearly universal critical acclaim. Unlike the source material, a family drama focusing on two POWs returning home after 17 years, Showtime's version balances familial drama with a provocative psychological thriller, according to co-creator/executive producer Howard Gordon (24).
"Theirs is really a Rip Van Winkle story, a big and sometimes tragic, sometimes moving, story about these two returning POWs," he said. "Ours is really a story about heroism and about the 'war on terror,' in quotes, because the war on terror is such a huge umbrella and under it includes our own wars in Iraq and Afghanistan [and] the war at home in terms of how we're surveilling perceived threats and what we're doing about them."
The issue of surveillance is especially prominent within Homeland, which has Carrie watching Brody's every move, even as the eyes of her superiors—particularly David Harewood's sharp-edged David Estes, a former lover of Carrie's, and Mandy Patinkin's Saul Berenson, her grizzled mentor—are monitoring her as well. Add to that the idea that the audience is in fact watching her watching him, and there's an intentionally uncomfortable sense of voyeurism, one that adds to the deep patina of paranoia that hovers uneasily over the entire piece.
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