Making ‘Homeland’
At a late July press conference for “Homeland,” executive producer Alex Gansa said the season premiere was built around Carrie’s terror/crazy/ euphoria moment at the end of the episode.
“The whole episode was constructed around someone who was very reluctant and reticent to get back involved,” he said. “She’s in a much more sort of stable place emotionally, the beneficiary of six months of psychiatric care, professional help for a condition that she’s never been treated for before. So that there was this real reluctance to get back in the field, yet a pull to do the work. And then when she finds herself there, it invigorates her, and she gets high on the action. So the whole episode was constructed around that particular moment, and Claire has a wicked smile on her, doesn’t she?”
Carrie still has a lot of selfdoubt as the season begins. She says she’s never felt more right than when she suspected Brody of being a terrorist, which he is, but she doesn’t know that.
“I think she probably did have some suspicion that maybe her condition was responsible for her genius, and I think that’s probably true for a lot of people with the condition,” Ms. Danes said. “But I think she will find a deeper confidence that she can tame it and remain as brilliant and forward thinking as she would like to be.”
Look for the key to Carrie’s deeper confidence to be revealed at the end of the second episode of season two. Carrie’s newfound confidence also may lead to more turmoil for Brody, who seems shocked in the season premiere to be back doing dirty work for terrorist Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban).
“Brody made a mission statement at the end of the first season saying he wanted a nonviolent political subversion of American policy,” Mr. Lewis said. “He would like to think he’s in control of his own destiny. He absolutely won’t be, is my prediction for this season, and I think he will live in a state of heightened anxiety and paranoia and uncertainty. … He’s more, I think, knowingly juggling balls this season. … He’s pretty [screwed].”
As for the role “Homeland” plays in American culture, particularly when real world events get ahead of the storytelling, Mr. Gansa said it’s something the writers keep in mind.
“We do everything we can in terms of writing the scripts and shooting the scripts to make this thing feel believable. Now, whether that has some sort of negative political consequence in the country, I don’t think so only because we also try, as best we can, to ask the questions rather than answer them,” he said. “If there’s one thing we’ve tried hard to do across all our characters is to give them depth and complexity and rationale for behaving the way that they do so that people will maybe understand a different point of view even though they may disagree with how that point of view translates into action.”
For Showtime subscribers who want to catch up on the first season of “Homeland,” Showtime will air a season one marathon beginning at noon Saturday.