How has ‘Homeland’ survived so long?
Entering its eighth and final season, this series became a master of adapting to the times
MATT BRENNAN
Yes, “Homeland” is still on.
In conversation and on social media, the longevity of Showtime’s counterterrorism drama, which began its eighth and final season Sunday, often comes as a surprise. After all, it’s been more than eight years since its gripping first season — which premiered almost exactly one decade after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — dominated the cultural conversation, and its favour with Emmy voters and viewers alike peaked shortly thereafter.
But there’s a reason the series, created by “24” veterans Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa from Gideon Raff ’s Israeli “Prisoners of War,” has survived a sea change — or several — in both the medium of television and the so-called “war on terror.” “Homeland” is the most adaptable show on television.
Conceived as the dual portrait of a mentor — Mandy Patinkin’s Saul Berenson — shepherding his protégé — Claire Danes’ Carrie Mathison — through the thornbush of the Central Intelligence Agency, the series has since been a cat-and-mouse game, a fraught romance, a stripped-down spy thriller and a domestic political drama; a critics’ darling, a disappointment, a comeback kid. It embodies, perhaps more than any series to emerge from the medium’s recent “Golden Age,” the feature that differentiates TV from most other art forms: evolution over time.
Even at the outset, the shape of “Homeland” was far from certain. The first series under both Showtime chief David Nevins and Fox 21 head Bert Salke, it attracted an “onerous” amount of attention, Gansa says — particularly in the form of “tremendous opposition” to Danes as Mathison, a bipolar intelligence officer, and Damian Lewis as Nicholas Brody, an American PoW she suspects of being a sleeper agent for the terrorist Abu Nazir.
“I don’t think anyone wanted me to play him,” Lewis laughs.
He, of course, landed the role, and Gansa and company ultimately held off executives’ desire to cast Robin Wright or Maria Bello in the lead.
Once production was underway, what swiftly emerged was the electric chemistry between Danes and Lewis — to the point that a key scene in the pilot was rescripted and reshot, according to writer and executive producer Chip Johannessen.
The resulting arc, in which Brody and Carrie mix an illicit relationship with mutual mistrust, helped make the series an object of intense fan interest. Season 1 earned “universal acclaim” from critics, and eventually won Emmys for drama series, lead actress, lead actor and writing for a drama series.
“The first season started airing as we were filming, so I got pretty direct confirmation just from people on the street,” Danes recalls. “Insane enthusiasm. People were literally running out of buildings and grabbing me and saying, ‘I’m obsessed with your show!’ It was hard to ignore the impact.”
Although Brody’s abortive attempt on the life of the president of the United States in the Season 1 finale attracted more attention, the main characters’ romantic arc culminates in Carrie’s unbearably tense interrogation of Brody in the Season 2 entry “Q&A” — one of the finest hours of television produced in the past decade. But “Q&A” is also the moment to which several “Homeland” veterans trace the series’ ensuing struggles. By the end of Season 3, the New Yorker wondered, “Where Did ‘Homeland’ Go Wrong?”
“After we wrote (‘Q&A’), it became much more difficult to write the show,” Gansa admits, describing as “strained” a subsequent subplot in which Brody turns double agent, with Carrie as his handler.
Complicating matters was Showtime’s interest in continuing the relationship that had fuelled its smash hit for as long as possible. The writers had seen dramatic potential in extending Brody’s arc, originally planned for one season, into a second. But extending it beyond that came at executives’ behest.
As writing “Homeland” became more challenging in the face of these constraints, so did watching it. With the air let out of Brody and Carrie’s relationship, Carrie and Saul on the outs and Brody’s daughter, Dana (Morgan Saylor), embroiled in teenage mischief — with Timothée Chalamet! — more appropriate to a family melodrama, critics and fans alike began to turn against the series.
The solution came in the Season 3 finale, “The Star,” in which Brody is hanged in Tehran for killing the head of Iranian intelligence — a decision made against the network’s wishes.
It also left the writers to face that most seductive, and terrifying, opportunity: a clean slate.
Enter “spy camp,” an annual meeting at Washington’s City Tavern Club between the “Homeland” team and an array of current and former intelligence officers, State Department officials and journalists. Both Gansa and Johannessen say the conclave was crucial to the next stage of the series’ evolution.
Since the start of Season 4, “Homeland” has metamorphosed into a slim, spry thriller, structured almost like an anthology, with each 12-episode arc focused on a new challenge and set in a new locale: drone warfare in Pakistan, for instance, or ISIS sympathizers in Berlin.
At the start of the fourth season, Carrie, now the CIA station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, green-lights a strike on a Pakistani wedding, killing dozens of civilians but not her intended target, Taliban leader Haissam Haqqani. In reprisal, Haqqani kidnaps Saul, creating a diversion for his real endgame: a devastating attack on the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. The season climaxes with a pair of the series’ strongest episodes, “There’s Something Else Going on” and “13 Hours in Islamabad.”
Although Season 4 constituted “proof of concept,” per Johannessen, this new narrative approach also forced “Homeland” to become even more nimble: shifting the focus to Berlin, ISIS and Russian interference in Season 5, and then to domestic politics and locations in Seasons 6 and 7.
“Usually, with series TV, it gets easier year by year. You have it dialed in,” executive producer Lesli Linka Glatter explains. “‘Homeland’ never got easier, because we were always starting over.”
Although the success of Seasons 4 and 5 revived the series’ critical reputation, the same period saw increased scrutiny of the show’s depiction of Muslims. Detractors called it “bigoted” and “Islamophobic,” Pakistani officials complained that it maligned a close U.S. ally, and graffiti artists hired to create background art for Season 5 wrote “Homeland is racist” in Arabic in a scene that made it to air. As if in response, the next two seasons turned their attention to Russian meddling, “the deep state” and the American far right.
“I think there was some validity to those criticisms,” Danes says. “It was unfortunate that we were a little too glib or a little too reductive in our portrayal of those characters, but I think our response to it was quick and sincere.”
After filming consecutive seasons on location in South Africa (standing in for Pakistan) and Germany, Danes, Patinkin and the rest of the team were ready to come home. A discussion at that year’s spy camp about the practice of briefing the president-elect on national security issues inspired the New Yorkset Season 6, in which Carrie advises Sen. Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel), newly elected president, on an antiwar platform that antagonizes the intelligence community. The season premiered on Jan. 15, 2017, five days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
Although Gansa, Johannessen and Glatter maintain that Keane was not specifically modelled on Trump or his opponent, Hillary Clinton, the real-life campaign cast an unavoidable shadow over Season 6.
“That was the hardest moment for us, actually — that period during the election, when we were waiting to see who was going to actually come into office,” Danes recalls. “(The writers) were really stymied. I felt them to be creatively frustrated because of that lack of direction.”
Both Keane’s character and the “deep state” machinations that propel the season’s plot are an awkward fit, too far from the facts to seem prescient and too near to feel original.
As “Homeland’s” penultimate season began, with near selfparodic bluster, now-President Keane has imprisoned hundreds of members of the intelligence community in retaliation for an attempt on her life. Absent longtime ally Peter Quinn (fan favourite Rupert Friend), who sacrifices himself to save her and Keane at the end of Season 6, Carrie must take the fight to the woman in the Oval Office all by her lonesome. By the seventh season’s brilliant end, with Keane’s resignation and our heroine released to Saul after an extended stint in Russian captivity, “Homeland” returns to its foundational bond — and recaptures the taut terms of its finest hours.
It also sets up the final season’s “elegant” conceit, as Danes describes it. Although Carrie’s bipolar disorder is a running theme throughout the series, it returns to the forefront after her stint in prison, during which she has been denied her medication.
The possibility that she has revealed sensitive information while under such duress, and does not remember it, leads some in the intelligence community to question her allegiance.
Or, as Danes puts it, “Carrie becomes Brody.” This effect is underscored by the season’s plot, which Gansa says is designed in part to tie up loose ends from Season 4, including the fate of Haissam Haqqani. Very purposefully, in other words, the series’ closing arc conjures the feeling of vintage “Homeland.”
The list of TV series to survive long enough for such a phrase to be applicable at all is vanishingly short.
But the series’ end has a valedictory quality: as perhaps the last of the Golden Age dramas to go off the air, “Homeland” is an emblem of a form — the ongoing, prestige drama — that appears to be in decline.
In “Homeland’s” case, it’s not for lack of material. If anything, as we approach 20 years of the war on terror, the series’ continued relevance has become an objective correlative of the conflict’s endlessness.
“It could go on forever, a show like this,” Patinkin says. “If you can endure it.”
“Insane enthusiasm. People were literally running out of buildings and grabbing me and saying, ‘I’m obsessed with your show!’ It was hard to ignore the impact.”
CLAIRE DANES ‘HOMELAND’ STAR ON FAN REACTION TO SEASON 1
“Homeland” airs Sundays on Crave.