There are some shows that should only be one season. Heroes and Prison Break would have made pretty good one season shows, as they quickly lost their way after the first season. Damian Lewis had his own short lives series, Life, which should have been left off at one season.
The first season of Homeland had
a lot of promise. A forgotten POW is found in a locked room after being held hostage for eight years, but is he a hero or a villain? That’s the big question our hero, an ambitious CIA agent, has to answer.
We are shown from the start that Sargent Brody is not the hero that the Government wants us to believe he is. The villian in the piece, as usual, is the US Government-the real world villian that allowed 9/11 to happen. At least, that’s what Agent Carrie Mathison believes. She blames herself for the September 11th attacks, but we are never told exaclty why this might be.
Among the many twists and turns Homeland offers us is the fact that Sargent Brody’s super model wife stayed faithful to her missing husband for six years. But when she did decide to have a sexual relationship, it just happens to be with Brody’s old best friend. Brody in turns can’t stand having sex with the drop dead gorgeous Morena Baccarin-who played a Companion on Firefly and more recently played the head villain on the short lived revamping of V. Instead he runs off for a short fling with the slightly mad, far less attractive CIA agent, played by Claire Danes, who thinks he’s a terrorist.
Mandy Patinkin has a nice role where he plays a grumpy Jew who seems to have the same role in government that Mycroft Holmes has-he bosses everyone around and seems to have no boss of his own.
Homeland’s story is tight and tension filled right up to the finial two episodes, where it runs wildly off the tracks and leaves several major plot gaps open for the second season. How much better it would have been to just wrap it all up in a neat package and have done with it.
When actors do promos for networks like Showtime or HBO they like to talk about how much more freedom they have when they are not bound by the network censors. What this mainly translate into is more sex and violence and a liberal addition of the 7 Words-well, now more like two or three words-you can’t say on broadcast TV.
So Homeland
