I have no idea how the geniuses behind the Showtime drama Homeland are going to possibly top their first brilliant season. And this trailer for their sophomore season raises expectations sky high.
This show is like the anti-The Killing, which I've stopped watching because I got so fed up with the series and because of the botched season one conclusion. Homeland scribes have deftly figured out how to combine suspense and tension without leading viewers on or patronizing them with insulting red herrings.
My fingers are crossed that when they've got good stuff in store for us when the second season starts on September 30 and we again see Claire Danes' spectacularly complex Carrie Mathison and Damian Lewis' eerie Nicholas Brody. Mandy Patinkin as the curmudgeonly Saul Berenson is pretty awesome as well.
Joanne Bamberger, aka Pundit Mom, clued me in to this provocative and eye-opening speech by Megan Kamerick, a former president of the Journalism & Women Symposium, about how women’s voices are disproportionately absent from news stories and features, despite the fact that women constitute over half of the population.
“Stories by female reporters are more likely to challenge stereotypes than those by male reporters,” Kamerick said.
“Women are more likely to be defined by their body parts,” she said, showing a cover image of WiredMagazine of a woman’s naked chest, noting that women rarely appear on the cover of Wired unless they're sexualized.
Homeland showrunners told New York Magazine’s Vulture that they originally anticipated that Sgt. Nick Brody would only appear in the first season.
“I think when Alex [Gansa, his co-showrunner] and I first conceived the series, it seemed obvious that we couldn’t take the show with Brody as a character beyond the first season. But then we realized how rich that mine was and how much more there was left to get out of it,” Howard Gordon, the other Homeland showrunner, told New York.
“Brody’s surviving the finale was very much in doubt,” Gansa said. “We really talked about it both ways. Ultimately we felt there was more to tell in the saga between Carrie and Brody, in that relationship.”
Now there are some who thought the finale was a cop-out and they didn’t like it in the least. I was surprised at the abruptness of its tonal shift when Brody attempted to blow himself up, only to have his explosive vest malfunction. He fixed it, was ready to try again, but hearing his daughter’s pleading voice on his cell phone (prompted to call him by Carrie Mathison) persuaded him to go another way and later rationalize to Abu Nazir that he could do more damage by working within the system rather than just killing the folks in that bunker.
I admit I was a bit let down when the credits rolled on this finale. Then I slept on it. Why was I let down, because Brody DIDN’T kill people? I didn’t want him to kill people. I didn’t want to see the glorification of a suicide bomber. When I woke up the next morning and thought about what the Homeland writers had done – turning a would-be lethal protest into something more subtle in the form of working within the system – I decided that the writers took the harder and more intriguing road. In the world of 24, things were always blowing up, even nuclear bombs. Sure, seeing a bomb go off is dramatic, but seeing people wrestle with their conscience, with right and wrong, with loyalties and with consequences is so much more interesting.
Later in the New York interview, Gansa, who noted that Brody’s suicide video is still missing, added:
“[Brody] flipped the switch, which satisfied our feeling that this is someone who would go through with what he decided to do, and then it opened up the possibility of redemption after the fact, when he fixes the vest and almost goes through with it for the second time. We all like Brody now, and we want him to be redeemed, and we kind of got to have it both ways.”
What’s Eating The Grinch?
In honor of the Christmas season, I’m going to direct you to an essay in McSweeney’s by Robb Fritz which dissected what was really bugging that mean old Grinch and discussed how the green being used his happy-go-lucky dog Max as his “put-upon canine slave, made to dress up as an unconvincing reindeer with one heavy faux-antler roped onto his head.”
“There’s no indication that the Grinch, unlike Scrooge, is a wealthy, malevolent, card carrying member of the 1%,” Fritz wrote. “He’s more just a finicky grump who hates it when his downstairs neighbors have late night parties, ostensibly because the noise keeps him up, but maybe just possibly because he hasn’t been invited.”
If you get Showtime and/or the Starz Channels, do yourself a favor, start watching Homeland, starring Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin, and Boss, starring Kelsey Grammer in a role that’ll make you say, “Frasier who?”
Both shows are unpredictable. Both of them have shocked and intrigued me and left me craving more. Intelligent and challenging, they are two of the best dramatic offerings you’re going to find airing right now.
A half dozen episodes into Homeland, here are a few of the things viewers have witnessed:
A Marine sergeant, who’d been held hostage and was tortured in Afghanistan for eight years, was discovered by U.S. troops, after a CIA agent had been told that a U.S. POW had been turned by the enemy and would be used as a tool to hurt Americans.
That CIA agent, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) set up surveillance in the home of Marine Sgt. Nick Brody where she obsessively watched all the intimate goings on in his house for several weeks, including relations with his wife Jessica (Morena Baccarin who was the alien leader on V), who’d presumed her husband was dead and took up with Nick’s best friend.
Brody has been secretly reciting Muslim prayers on a prayer rug in his garage and having flashbacks of being held at gunpoint and forced to beat a Marine colleague to death.
Carrie has serious mental health issues that she’s hiding from the CIA and from her dodgy mentor Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) who seems to have a murky past of his own.
Brody’s lead torturer, who has affiliations with a terrorist group, was apprehended and Carrie’s supervisor allowed Brody to speak with him. Shortly thereafter, the torturer committed suicide with a razor blade. It was assumed that someone slipped him a blade. Carrie suspects Brody.
Brody beat the heck out of his former best friend Mike who had become romantically involved with his wife Jessica and later, Brody had drunk sex with Carrie in a car.
Folks who’ve seen the next new episode are raising expectations to lofty heights. I can’t wait.
A few episodes into Boss, a brutal, profane examination of raw political mayoral power at the epicenter of an old school Chicago machine, we’ve seen:
Kingpin Mayor Tom Kane (Grammer) violently grab and twist the ear of a supporter whose underling had made things difficult for one of the mayor’s landmark public projects. Later, the underling who’d gone on TV and caused problems for Kane presented the mayor with a gift box wrapped with a tidy bow. Inside the box? His ears, indicating that he’s now listening. Kane chucked the ears down the garbage disposal in his kitchen sink.
Kane is suffering from a degenerative, fatal disease (Lewy Body Dementia) that will compromise his mental functions, cause hallucinations and confusion, as well as affect physical functions. He's been buying drugs from a drug dealer in darkened parks to try to treat curtail his symptoms.
The neurologist who diagnosed Kane has been assaulted and threatened by a Kane henchman after a pesky newspaper reporter came to visit her and asked questions about the mayor’s health. After that same reporter confronted the mayor’s wife about the neurologist, Kane’s goon demanded that the doctor take her son and flee the city. Immediately.
One of Kane’s key staffers has taken to having brazen, risky, adulterous sex in hallways and stairwells of public venues with a young, charismatic, Kane-backed candidate for governor who has a wife and two young children.
There’s a strange side-story involving Kane’s estranged minister/addict daughter Emma and the icy reaction Kane’s contact with Emma elicited from Kane’s estranged wife Meredith, with whom he no longer shares a bed.
Between Homeland and Boss, I’ve been left wondering where they’ll take me next.
