Homeland Blows Its Cover

There’s one more week left in Season 2 of Homeland, which means there’s one week before I cancel Showtime once and for all. 

I enjoyed the first season, though I thought it was a guilty pleasure. It was a major reach to win the Emmy for Best Drama. I really do like depiction of the CIA intelligence gathering operation, and the on-the-ground stuff in the Middle East. But the hierarchal aspect is so contrived and far-fetched, it makes me cringe even in the comforts of my living room. The second season was gaining some steam but completely blew up into an off-brand version of 24.

Damain Lewis is the show’s only great character. As the tormented Sgt. Brody his performance is complicated and nuanced. With all that’s happened with him, as a POW, a terrorist, a US Congressman, and a double agent; every reaction to every situation has multiple emotions. You can see it on his face. Excellently played.

Mandy Patankin as CIA veteran analyst Saul Berenson is believable as a super-intelligent hothead. But he clashes with his superiors too often to think he’d still have a job, if not erased fro the earth. CIA assistant director David Estes is just an asshole, and Vice President William Walden (thankfully deceased) was just a bigger asshole.

Mastermind terrorist Abu Nazir was also a preposterous character. He had a nice role in Brody’s flashbacks, and how he went from being torturer to spiritual mentor. But once he showed up in the US, able to invisibly evade military TAC teams (and killing them) and move around an unlimited army of terrorists, he became farcical. I’m glad he’s dead too.

Which brings us to the show’s lead character, Carrie Mathison. Claire Danes’s portrayal transcends unrealistic and unsympathetic to absurd. Matheson, despite a schizophrenic condition that should be a constant disability, continues to be the smartest and most dogged ex-agent ever. She’s got heart coming out of her neatly tucked blouse.

She goes rogue more often than Jack Bauer and Dr. House combined, but she continues to get away with it because she’s always right, nobody can do her job as well as she can, and nobody knows the terrorists like she does.

I’m not-so-secretly hoping that everyone dies in the Season 2 finale. Then the show will have gotten it right.

Back On Home Land

This is the picture in my mind when I'm away too long. But my return home wasn't a beautiful Savannah day - it was gray and cold and dreary. My lawn is brown, the paint is peeling, and it looks more like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil at high noon.

It didn't help that there wasn't really time to manicure anything. Between conference calls, lunch with the kids, errands, sorting out upcoming travel, setting up a birthday party, filing expense reports, and getting back in the swing at karate class, I only had time for one thing at home:

I figured it was now 9 days after the election and I didn't want to be accused of spiking the football, so I  finally picked the souvenir up off my lawn. I'll just wait by the phone for the Smithsonian to call.

When I settled down tonight I ordered a pizza, cracked open a Stone IPA and got caught up on Homeland. While I think Claire Danes's portrayal of Carrie Mathison is a little overdone, Damian Lewis as Sgt/POW/terrorist/Congressman Nicholas Brody is phenomenally layered and conflicted.

I like the second season better than the first, as the intrigue of Brody being a double agent is really reaching a boiling point. But there's still silly romance and family drama. If I'm going to watch a soap opera, it better have a lot of zombies getting decapitated on a weekly basis.

Although in the real-life intelligence community, it would seem that there's plenty of love affair sleaziness to go around. One pundit on whichever cable news outlet described the Petraeus fiasco as "The Real Housewives of CentCom." Maybe I'm too hard on these shows that romantically link all their main characters. Maybe life does imitate art after all.