I’ve just finished watching the
first series of Homeland and I couldn’t help but blog about it. It is fantastic
television and my advice would be for everyone to watch it. It is as riveting
as the first few, and in my opinion superior, series of 24. It has the pace and
style that you had with the first couple of seasons of the West Wing, and it
keeps you as on edge as Lost did – you know when it was good and hadn’t become far
too bizarre to follow!
To continue to rave about
Homeland is going to be difficult to do, simply because much like 24 this
series has a number of twists and turns, and false starts and raised
expectations, and misconceptions that will keep you as a viewer perpetually guessing
as to who the good guys are and whose side you should be on.
Starting out it seems like the
CIA has completely lost the ability to tell enemy from citizen, but then it
seems that perhaps there is method in their madness after all. Yet is there??
The final episode left me reeling, and absolutely gasping and grabbing at my
laptop to look at IMDB and Google to see if there was going to be a second
series. There is – phew!
Now in short, what is it all
about? Well, as I said above I really don’t want to reveal any spoilers. I
appreciate that I did this in my Sherlock blog and for that I apologise. So
here is my brief summary to try and entice you into giving Homeland a chance.
In Homeland the plot centres on
Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody – played by the amazing (and English – not that
this is relevant) actor Damian Lewis, who after being held prisoner for eight
years in Iraq and presumed dead by the military and therefore also his wife and
two children is found by the CIA and returned home. In the opening minutes of
the first episode Claire Danes who plays Carrie Mathison – a driven but
possibly unstable CIA officer, is told by an informant in Iraq that an American
soldier has been turned. So the plot begins. Is Brody who he says he is?
The next few episodes keep you
absolutely enthralled. Brody struggles to readjust to a civilian life in a
world that he has not lived in for eight years, and his wife and children who
had all accepted his death and moved on must also find a way to re-connect with
him. The writing is excellent and you really feel for the Brody family, not
least because of the antics of Danes’ character. Convinced that her informant
was referring to Brody, she – without permission or authority, puts surveillance
in the Brody household and observes them twenty four hours a day.
The surprises in this series just
keep coming, and they come thick and fast in most episodes. It definitely felt
a lot like watching 24, as even in the early hours of the morning there was
always time for one more episode. Just one more, despite the fact that it is
3am on a Monday morning!
I was also incredibly impressed
with the balls that the writing and the program showed. There seemed to be no
retreat from looking at contentious issues, such as racial profiling, religious
stereotyping, emotional drivers behind terrorism, and added to all of this it
also looks at the stigma of mental health – bi-polar, and the extremely controversial
electroshock treatment.
Trust me when I tell you that at
the end of the final episode you will be inclined, as I was, to be shouting at the
television. Is it just possible that the one person that is considered to be
the most of all the characters to be unreliable, unstable, and by then end of
the series mentally deficient, is the only one that can actually see the
writing on the wall?
I don’t know. Its back to IMDB
and Google to see when Season 2 starts!!
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