There’s this great new show on Showtime called Homeland. You may confuse it with another Showtime series also called Homeland that ended its third season last year on a very sour note. To make matters worse, they both star the same actress, Claire Danes, playing Carrie Mathison, a comically unhinged CIA agent.
But the similarities stop there.
All kidding aside, halfway into Homeland’s fourth season and the show almost feels like a revelation. Gone are Carrie’s maniacal plunges into mental illness. Gone is tortured war vet Brody. And, most importantly, gone is the audience-torturing Dana Brody.
Left in their wake is a more confident and focused series. As I’ve previously mentioned, the reboot centers on Carrie’s new career as station chief in Pakistan. To say much more about the plot of the season would be to ruin the great surprises in store for the uninitiated. This is a series that, in its phoenix-like rise from the ashes, isn’t afraid to take chances. It’s very committed to its newfound energy, and it has brilliantly re-engaged the audience by bringing back a critical element of any great thriller: the element of surprise.
It’s not a massive spoiler to say that people die, but the deaths are well-considered and logical outcomes of character actions. They don’t live in shark-jumping territory. Unlike previous seasons, the decisions in Homeland season four have real weight to them, and there are serious consequences from the even the most mundane acts.
Claire Danes received two Emmy awards and a third nomination last year for her performance in the series, and, if the TV Academy weren’t already engraving the award for Viola Davis’s ridiculously towering performance in How to Get Away with Murder, I’d say Danes was in the running for another trophy for the role. The premiere episodes alone give us a new side to Carrie Mathison, the woefully unfit mother who flees to Pakistan to avoid facing the complete absence of a maternal instinct. Subsequent episodes find Carrie back in seduction mode, struggling with real emotions. Or perhaps struggling to fake real emotions? It’s difficult to tell with her.
Aside from the always-reliable Mandy Patinkin, I’m also hugely impressed by Rupert Friend’s work as shell-shocked Peter Quinn and Laila Robins’s calming and saddened performance as Martha Boyd, US ambassador to Pakistan. Finally, Nazanin Boniadi continues into season four as a more confident and mature Fara, the young CIA analyst originally recruited following last season’s Langley bombing.
Rebuilding an older show is a difficult task to undertake, but Homeland has admirably cleared any of my doubts that the show is still a vital one. It still hasn’t quite reached the heights of its massively successful premiere season, which expertly rode the Brody tension to an Emmy win for Best Dramatic series. I’m not sure that it can again regain that stature.
However, the show continues to surprise, and, given its seemingly endless thirst for character blood, I wouldn’t put anything past it at this point.
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