Far From Homeland
Homeland season three would rank as great drama if it wasn’t for the existence of Homeland season one. The current, expansive escapades of the frequently — and jazzily — upset Carrie, the Sipowicz-ian Saul, and Suicide Sally or whatever her name is, now seem like a spin-off series from the main event, which was a razor-focused one-off that perfectly reflected the mood of the times.
The times have now caught up with Homeland: Snowden, Miranda and sundry Russians are generating much more compulsive drama than the Brody bunch. This is always a possibility for writers tackling contemporary concerns, and may go some way to explain why Homeland’s hacks have opened up the show beyond the core question of who’s bluffing whom, turning it now into a sort of Tom Clancy epic (but with all the air let out).
It’s a different beast: certainly not better than Homeland one (or two), but still better than, say, Peaky Blinders. Audiences can’t really handle change, though, especially not when the love they felt in the first place was so passionate, and seemed like it was going to be so brilliantly reciprocated.
Ratings are plummeting, and the show only has itself to blame. It’s got caught up in the “golden age of TV” idea that cleverness is all. So they’ve split a storyline that should’ve been wrapped up in episode one over four interminable hours (“we’re giving the narrative time to stretch, our fans like to be challenged”), they shaved Brody and left him stranded in Venezuela until ep three (“we take risks!”), and they’ve diverged into a teen runaway drama that no one asked for (unless we’re talking The Sopranos, the “kid plots” in US TV dramas are always awful — the nadir reached in 24, though The Americans made a heroic dive in that direction too).
The mistake they’ve made is thinking the twists are what keep us coming back. Superficially that may be correct, as ep four’s switcheroo certainly had me willing to give the new Homeland another chance. But the heart of the show is the relationship between Carrie and Brody. Neither keeps our interest on their own. And no amount of “didn’t-see-that-coming” can replace that human drama.
