Homeland - 'Pilot'

 

February 23rd 2012

After years of trying to keep up with critically acclaimed, high-concept American shows, watching with my face almost pressed to the screen for fear that I miss a crucial piece of garbled dialogue and inevitably ending the hour of viewing with a headache, I approached the much-hyped Homeland with some trepidation. In this case, however, such fears were completely unfounded, and I instead found a perfectly paced and gripping drama.

The central premise of the series is that a raid on an al-Qaeda compound stumbles upon prisoner of war Nicholas Brody (played by a terrifically beardy Damian Lewis), an American marine who has been missing for 8 years. Triumphantly borne back to America as a war hero, there is one woman who is not welcoming him with open arms: renegade CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes). Based on information that an American POW has been ‘turned’, gleaned from an unauthorised visit to a terrorist in an Iraqi prison ten months earlier, she decides that Brody is the POW in question, that their discovering him in the compound was a set-up, and that he has been brought back to the US as a threat, a sleeper agent about to bring down the country from the inside. Overwhelmed with suspicion but in her superiors’ bad books after her sortie into the Iraq prison, she goes rogue and sets up surveillance in Brody’s home, determined to unmask him.

Playing brilliantly with post-9/11 paranoia, the key to Homeland’s success lies not just in this intriguing premise, but in the way these themes of paranoia and trust pervade the entire show. What could have been a simple “is he evil or not?” is complicated by the uncomfortable truths we unravel about his opposite number: Carrie turns out to be suffering from a mood disorder, on anti-psychotic drugs, and with a history of unstable and reckless behaviour – and it soon becomes not just a question of whether she can trust Brody, but whether we can trust her.

By the end of the episode, through clever use of flashbacks we discover that Brody is certainly hiding something, after it is revealed that he lied about his fellow Marine’s death – Brody, under orders from Abu Nazir who he had claimed he had never met, beat him to death whilst they were held captive. The details are hazy, but it’s a clever way to end an episode built upon conspiracy and deceit.

My only reservation about Homeland would be whether the central intrigue can be sustained over the entire series as masterfully as it is in the opening episode. The inclusion of clever sub-plots such as Brody’s wife, under the impression he was dead, conducting an affair with his best friend, plus Brody’s children – one an unruly teen, the other too young to remember his father – seems to show that the drama has mileage. Homeland has already garnered awards in America and has been renewed for a second series, which suggests that this intense and enthralling drama is most definitely one to watch.