How “Homeland” Raised the Bar for Television Drama
By: Richard Lebeau
Tags: Television, Feminism, Media, Culture, Society

The Evolution of Homeland

The Emmy-winning espionage thriller Homeland premiered on October 2, 2011. For context, its premiere occurred 10 years and a few weeks after the historic events of 9/11 that in many ways serve the catalyst for the show and 16 months after the series finale of the Fox juggernaut 24, an espionage thriller that mined similar narrative territory but with a decidedly more network TV spin. Created by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa (both of whom had worked on 24), the series was an adaptation of an Israeli series called Prisoners of War, which had premiered a year prior to great acclaim.

Season One promotional image (Copyright: Showtime/20th Television)

The show centered on CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a brilliant, brave, and determined woman battling some internal demons, including a longstanding struggle with bipolar disorder. In the pilot episode, she became convinced that a U.S. Marine Corps Scout Sniper named Nicolas Brody (Damian Lewis), who was being touted as an American hero after being held as a prisoner of war by Al-Qaeda, had actually been turned by the enemy and was a threat to national security. One of the only people who believed her — or was at least open to what she has to say — was her mentor Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), who was at that time the CIA’s Middle-East Division Chief.

Homeland was a breakout hit in many ways. It instantly won over critics, as evidenced by its first season’s stunning 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and average rating of 92 out of 100 on Metacritic. Its ratings were solid by the pay cable network’s standards and steadily grew over the course of the season. The show generated enormous buzz both for its quality and its tantalizing premise, not to mention the fact that it featured highly praised turns by a pair of actors quite familiar to American audiences (Claire Danes had starred on the cult favorite TV drama My So-Called Life as a teenager and in hit films like Romeo + Juliet, whereas Mandy Patinkin had a long career on Broadway, won an Emmy for his work on the medical drama Chicago Hope, and is well known to film fans for his role in The Princess Bride.) Its breakout status was cemented at the 64th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards where it almost made a clean sweep of the main categories, winning Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Lead Actress (Danes), Outstanding Lead Actor (Lewis), and Outstanding Writing.

Claire Danes with one of her Emmys for her role as Carrie Mathison (Copyright: ABC/ATAS)

Its second season, in which it was firmly established that Carrie was right about Brody all along and their fates became intertwined, grew even bigger in the ratings and scored even more Emmy nominations than the first. (This time around it didn’t sweep the Emmys, but it did score repeat wins for Danes and its writing.) Even by its second season, however, the show was becoming an uneven. This was largely due to too much focus on the meandering domestic drama of Brody’s wife and children and the provocative dynamic between Carrie and Brody that frequently threatened to stretch believability too far. Nevertheless, it produced some truly masterful episodes and rallied for a jaw dropping season finale that was one of the most electrifying television episodes of the decade.

Everything that was starting to falter during the second season came to a head in the third. The writers were simply unable to generate interesting and believable content for the Brody family. The season was all over the place, a mish-mash of tepid domestic drama, explosive espionage, and logic-defying soap opera antics. Many critics and fans wrote off the show as a two-season wonder. The Emmys followed suit, giving it only two major nominations (for Danes and Patinkin, who admittedly continued to turn in brilliant work even when the narrative lost its way).

Season Four promotional image (Copyright: Showtime/20th Television)

What most people assumed was a flameout, however, turned out actually to be just a bump in the road. The show returned the following fall with its best season yet. The fourth season rebooted the series by dropping the Brodys entirely, giving Carrie and Saul new jobs, moving the action to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and introducing a host of compelling characters. The show clawed its way back into key Emmy categories like Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Directing, which is highly unusual. (More often than not, once the Emmys drop a show, it rarely gets back in their good graces.) Season Five rebooted the series again, relocating Carrie to Germany and introducing one of its most brilliant (albeit short-lived) characters in Russian double agent Allison Carr (played by Miranda Otto). That season, too, gained Emmy nominations in several major categories, including Outstanding Drama Series.

The sixth season premiered in the final weeks of the tragic 2016 Presidential election campaign. Sensing the shift in American viewers’ interests and the global political and military conversations, the series redirected its focus to domestic affairs. The sixth and seventh season both largely focused on Carrie’s strained relationship with Saul, her complicated relationship with motherhood, and the tumultuous presidency of Elizabeth Keane (played brilliantly by Elizabeth Marvel). Although frequently compelling, the seasons were a bit uneven, particularly the seventh. The show delved into subplots like a custody battle for Carrie, an epic relapse of her bipolar disorder, and her complex relationship with former colleague Quinn (Rupert Friend, who rose to the occasion with a brilliant performance in Season Six after his character became physically, emotionally, and cognitively scarred by exposure to a chemical weapon). There was brilliant acting, strong production values, and compelling sociopolitical commentary, but the show had lost some of the spark it had in its early seasons with the central Brody dynamic and the previous two seasons that benefitted enormously from the change of scenery.

Season Eight promotional image (Copyright: Showtime/20th Television)

Thankfully, the writers recognized this and moved the action back to the Middle East for the reinvigorated final season, which wrapped last Sunday. The season began with Saul enlisting Carrie’s help as he tries to end the war in Afghanistan in his new capacity as National Security Advisor. Unfortunately, he is just about the only person who trusts Carrie, given that she was recently released from seven months as a political prisoner in Russia. It’s a brilliant reversal of the dynamic that kicked the show off — this time Carrie is the returning prisoner of war who no one trusts. It is also an infuriating, but fitting and realistic, journey for her character given that Carrie Mathison has spent the show’s whole run breaking rules, taking enormous and reckless risks, and refusing to play nice. The fact that it all plays out against the backdrop of an imminent political crisis involving Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Russia makes it all the richer. It’s not as consistently brilliant as its best season (that would be Season Four), but it came tantalizingly close. And, thankfully, it spent its final episodes focused on Carrie and Saul, the show’s most fascinating and enduring relationship.