Homeland avoids being Trumped
Homeland showrunner Alex Gansa talks to Emily Heil about the show’s future and what he has in common with President Trump.
The gritty spy thriller Homeland has a way of incorporating very real elements – fake-news, tension between a president and the intelligence community, and the war on terror – into its storylines. The show’s seventh and penultimate season, looks like more of the same rippedfrom-the-cable-chyrons action.
We chatted with showrunner, writer and producer Alex Gansa about how he nails the details of intelligence-gathering, filming this season in Richmond, Virginia, and the unexpected thing he has in common with President Donald Trump.
What was in the news when the show was being written? So much has happened. It is astonishing. Not only terrifying that it’s all real, but terrifying to try to parallel on our show, and we’re worried that the news will outpace the story. We started to think about the season in late April. That’s when we take our annual trip to Washington, DC, and sit down withour consultants and people in the intelligence community and a number of journalists. In previous years, we’ve had people who work in the White House and State Department, although we weren’t privy to that this time around. Donald Trump had been president for a couple of months and when we were in Washington, DC, North Korea was really on the table. North Korea doesn’t figure in our story this year, but there was tremendous concern about what the administration was planning.
How have current events found their way into the season?
You have an embattled president believing that the ‘‘deep state’’ is against him. In our story, we have a president who feels the same way. The main way is this antagonism between a newly elected president and the people in the government – the people who are there from one administration to the next. It’s that conflict between these two camps that has influenced the show. And just how divided and polarised America is right now. When you find democracy split down the middle like that, it becomes a vulnerable target for other countries.
So is this season like Donald Trump’s fever dream?
The show isn’t about the Trump administration at all. It’s its own fiction. But we are writing the show in real-time,so we can’t help but have what’s going on in the real world influence the story. When a big piece of news breaks, sometimes it can’t help but lend itself to the story.
Tell me about these field trips.
We go for five days – we bring all the writers, Lesli Linka Glatter, our executive producer, Mandy Patinkin and Claire Danes. We take up residence in an old club in Georgetown and we entertain people from 9am to 6pm.
It could not have been more different this year. In the past, we’d have people from the intelligence community brief us and then we’d have a Washington Post reporter orNew York Times reporter come in and take up a counter-position to what we’d just heard. For the first time this year, the intelligence community and the Fourth Estate were on the same page. Two distinct communities that believe themselves to be fact-oriented had aligned in a way we hadn’t seen during the past four years. Clearly, there was a lot of leaking going on to journalists from the intelligence community and that was a partnership we had not witnessed before.
Actually, it lends a little credibility to the paranoia inside of the Trump White House that there were major forces allied against him. In the past, we’d be searching around for a story to tell. Like in Season four when we wanted to put Carrie in a case officer position overseas, we asked the room, ‘‘If you were going to be posted, where would you want to be posted?’’ And at the time, everyone said Afghanistan or Pakistan, and that’s where we set the story.
In Season six, since we knew we would be airing during the transition, we learned a lot about the transition from one presidential administration to the next. The time we spend in DC could not be more influential. This season, of course, it was all about Trump.
You have lots of high-profile fans in the government, like former presidents Obama and Clinton, and in the intelligence world – to what extent does that make you feel pressure?
It is a little intimidating to know that those people are watching. The dramatic licence we have to take will be met with eye rolls from some of our consultants. But what is most rewarding is that we are confident that although we might not get the letter of this stuff right, we are most often getting the spirit of it right.
Where does the show go from here?
We’re doing one more season, and we’ve already started thinking. We’d love to take Homeland back to where it started, in Israel. Will that be feasible? We’ll have to see.
Why set it in Washington?
If Hillary Clinton won, would we be filming Homeland in DC now? I think not. There is something compelling and disturbing about what’s happening to the country. It gives us an opportunity to comment on that by telling the story there. If Hillary Clinton were president, it would be business as usual. It wouldn’t be this 24-hour news cycle where something crazy happens every day.
Does it ever bug you that people focus so much on what in the show is based on real life? Are you ever like, ‘‘c’mon, it’s fake!’’?
I’m not as offended by that as I am by people who think we’re Islamophobic. The left accuses us of being Islamophobic and the right accuses us of being soft on the Muslim community. People read into the show a political agenda that I don’t think exists. What we are trying to do is to take a character, Carrie Mathison, who was an intelligence officer and the one thing we’ve learned in talking to intelligence officers is that these are intensely patriotic people who spend 24 hours a day trying to keep us safe.
Do you ever imagine President Trump watching the show?
Something tells me he’s not watching hour-long dramas. I may be wrong – if he was watching this show, that would be fantastic. When Obama watched the show we were all incredibly honoured. If [Trump] is, I’d love to have a conversation with him about it.
❚ Homeland, 9.30pm, Mondays, from February 12, SoHo.