What Are You Watching

[ganulv]

The Showtime series Homeland which premiered Sunday night has gotten a passel of reviews calling it the best new show of the 2011/12 television season. I watched the SFW online pre-release a couple of weekends ago and liked it so much I made it a point not to miss the unedited version Sunday.

There’s a nice trailer that gives the gist and the excerpt below from the NPR review does the same via text. If you count yourself as a fan of 24 and/or Band of Brothers, Homeland is executive produced by the pair who did the same for the former and stars the chap who played Richard Winters in the latter.* There are some did not do the research moments, of course, but fewer than I expected given the genre.

One new show premiering Sunday, following Dexter on Showtime, has a narrative path all its own, one I’ve never seen before in a weekly TV series, and that’s saying something.

It’s called Homeland, and stars Claire Danes as Carrie Matheson, a CIA agent who becomes obsessed with Sgt. Nick Brody, an American POW located and rescued after years of brutal captivity in Iraq. Nick, played by Damian Lewis from Band of Brothers and NBC’s Life, is about to return home to a hero’s welcome. But Carrie, acting on a scrap of vague information, suspects Nick may have been turned while held prisoner, and is now a double agent for al-Qaida. Carrie takes her suspicions to one of her bosses—played by Mandy Patinkin, in a very welcome return to TV—but he’s not buying it.

If Carrie is right, she’s the real hero of this story. If not, Nick’s not only the victim—he’s the hero, too. For the first few episodes of Homeland, our loyalties are split, and we don’t know which character to root for, only that they’re both played by incredibly likable and sympathetic performers. And watching Carrie pursue Brody, without being certain of his true motives, puts a fascinating new twist on an otherwise familiar tale.

Eventually, we will discover the truth, and the series, and the drama, will continue from there. But for right now, Homeland is offering something unique to television. And when you’re talking about television, that’s a phrase you don’t hear very often.

*For me, 24 is only worth watching from the peanut gallery to see the next implausibly stupid thing the writers create for Kim to do and the majority of the actors in Band of Brothers—Matthew Settle being a notable exception—played the atmosphere rather than a character (i.e., they played ‘a guy from the ‘40s’ rather than a human being in a story occurring in the ‘40s). I don’t think BoB was bad by any measure, but count me as one of the few who finds The Pacific to be the vastly superior of the two. And no, I do not kick puppies.