KEEP CALM AND CARRIE ON
Hank Stuever wonders what kind of TV hero will fight terrorism next.
For all his scrapes, personal losses and ridiculously close calls, Jack Bauer, the gruff and personality-challenged counterterrorism agent played by Kiefer Sutherland on the Fox network hit 24, had it relatively easy compared with Carrie Mathison, the resilient but often deeply compromised (and, as it happened, bipolar), CIA agent played by Claire Danes on Homeland, which ended Sunday after an impressively consistent eight-season run.
Jack and Carrie came to separately represent the pressing global crises of their times. American viewers found they were able to project a lot of their anxieties about national security onto 24, which functioned as a one-hour, adrenalin-soaked workout.
Catharsis was harder to come by in Homeland, but that made it a far better and more relevant show. The defeats suffered by its characters (mainly Danes as Carrie and Mandy Patinkin as Carrie’s mentor, intelligence adviser Saul Berenson), made Homeland more believable, as the 21st century’s real-life war against terror dragged endlessly on. It was clear from Homeland’s first season, Carrie would navigate far more complex and murky territory — the show’s prescience included many instances of rogue activity by intelligence officers, who are always galled by executive-branch ineptitude, which the show treated as a chronic condition from one president to the next.
Co-created and meticulously overseen by executive producer and writer Alex Gansa (and adapted originally from an Israeli TV series), Homeland began as a fascinating thriller about the trustworthiness of a recently rescued Marine POW, Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis).
While the nation celebrated Brody as a war hero, Carrie worked to discover whether Brody was a convert to radical Islamic terrorism. Seven seasons later, Homeland had flipped the script: Carrie, who spent months in a Russian prison deprived of her psychiatric medications, is now distrusted by her colleagues, who worry she may be a Russian spy.
Homeland demonstrated an eerie knack for staying a halfstep ahead of the news. It was obsessed with online Russian propaganda and right-wing chaos-makers just as the nation began to see (and ignore) the strings attached to so many puppets.
In its final go-round, Homeland is preoccupied with Saul’s long-sought peace accord between the United States and the Taliban.
The American president (Beau Bridges) travelled to Afghanistan to seal the deal, but he was killed when his military helicopter crashed — an event designed to look as if it the Taliban shot down the aircraft.
Defying her CIA minders, Carrie has spent great effort in recent episodes finding (and then losing) the helicopter’s blackbox recorder, proving it was an accident. We are once again at the spot where Homeland always thrived: A world on the brink, and a whole lot of men who are determined not to listen to a woman everyone thinks has lost her marbles. A recap of Homeland’s entire story arc could just say: Nevertheless, she persisted.
Homeland was an unusual study in the art of midseason course correction, coming up with surprising and provocative solutions to the corners it painted itself into. Chief among these was Carrie’s decision, in season 7, to surrender custody of her daughter — the only TV mother I can think of whose solution to the work-life balance conundrum was to stop being a mother. It was a painful and powerful comment on the frantic state of the world, hers and ours.
When it comes to shows that are so strongly relevant, the best ones always leave a question in their wake: Who or what will take their place?
What sort of contemporary hero would be the natural successor to Jack Bauer or Carrie Mathison? And what will be the focus of their mission? Who or what is the enemy — domestic terrorism? Vladimir Putin? Climate-change deniers?
Is our next Jack or Carrie an outside rogue in the vein of Rami Malek’s hallucinating hacker in Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot, or could it be the betrayed and mentally manipulated soldiers and therapists of Esmail’s other show, the conspiratorial Homecoming, which returns next month?
None of the above, I suspect. Like the world itself, the job is now wide open and unsafe as ever. The character who gets the gig is destined to be tortured, literally and figuratively.