Homeland: Eight Seasons of Suspicion

Who would you believe?

Nicholas Brody's return is a public event and a private upheaval. There is an official story about what it means, a family trying to adjust, and a man who has spent years somewhere none of the people welcoming him can properly understand.

Damian Lewis is excellent at letting that uncertainty remain visible without signalling an answer. Brody can be physically present in a room while seeming a long way from everyone around him. You watch him because Carrie is watching him, but also because the performance makes the ordinary business of coming home feel difficult.

The set-up puts the viewer in an awkward position. Carrie has reasons for her suspicion, but suspicion isn't proof. The show gets an enormous amount out of that distinction. It is easy to make an intelligence officer impressive by giving her information nobody else has. It is much more interesting to make us consider whether she has understood the information correctly.

Carrie is the reason it lasts

Claire Danes gives Carrie Mathison the intensity the role needs without making her comfortable company. Carrie can be perceptive, impatient, persuasive and spectacularly difficult to deal with. Her commitment is convincing; so is the strain of being around someone who cannot readily leave a problem alone.

I like that her competence doesn't remove the possibility of a mistake. She has to argue, persuade and take risks, and other people have reasons of their own for resisting her. The writing gives her determination something solid to push against rather than arranging a roomful of fools so she can be right.

Her private life matters because the job doesn't politely stop at the office door. There is a cost to treating every unresolved question as something that must be pursued immediately. Danes makes that exhausting urgency felt, even in scenes without an obvious threat.

More than a difficult job

Carrie's bipolar disorder is part of the character, not a handy synonym for brilliance. The strongest scenes let her be an individual dealing with work, relationships and her own wellbeing rather than asking a diagnosis to explain everything she does.

What interests me is the difficulty of separating her judgement from other people's assumptions about her. A concern about her may be legitimate. It may also make it easier to dismiss something she has noticed. Homeland can let both of those tensions exist without making every argument resolve neatly.

That is a substantial part for an actor, and Danes commits to the uncomfortable moments as fully as the decisive ones. Carrie doesn't have to be admirable in every scene to be worth following. Sometimes wanting her to stop and think is precisely what makes the drama involving.

Carrie and Saul

Mandy Patinkin gives Saul Berenson the experience and patience that make his relationship with Carrie so watchable. He can listen without immediately agreeing. His warmth matters, but so does the sense that he has spent a long time making decisions he may not have enjoyed.

Their conversations are among the show's best. There is affection and professional trust, yet neither guarantees they will see a problem the same way. A small hesitation can matter because you believe there is a history behind it. Patinkin doesn't need to turn every disagreement into a confrontation to make it land.

Rupert Friend is another major strength as Peter Quinn. He brings a practical, watchful presence to a world full of people making arguments. He can be terse without becoming blank; you get the impression of somebody listening carefully and deciding what actually needs to be done.

There is good work around them too. Morena Baccarin gives Jessica Brody's domestic uncertainty proper weight, while F. Murray Abraham makes Dar Adal feel like someone with his own long experience of how the institution works. The supporting cast helps the world feel occupied, rather than assembled only when Carrie needs somebody to speak to.

A thriller built out of incomplete information

Homeland's best suspense often comes from the gap between what different people know. Someone in an office is assessing a situation that somebody else is physically standing in. An order may sound reasonable from one end of the conversation and disastrous from the other.

The writing makes those gaps legible enough that you can follow the risk without knowing exactly what will happen. That is a big part of the pleasure. You are thinking along with the people involved, noticing the same missing piece or worrying about an assumption they seem willing to accept.

It also understands that an operation is made of small dependencies. A person has to answer, a message has to arrive, someone has to hold their nerve. You don't need an explosion every few minutes when a delay can already make the scene unbearable.

The programme asks for attention, but generally earns it. The detail is there to create pressure rather than simply make the dialogue sound clever.

The later seasons are worth staying for

A series with an opening this strong could easily spend the rest of its run trying to keep the same situation alive. Homeland is more willing to move. Its changing locations and political crises give Carrie different work to do, and they change the pressures on the people around her.

I particularly appreciate that it doesn't run out of ideas once the original premise has had room to develop. The later years remain a substantial part of why I recommend the whole show. There is more here than a brilliant first season followed by an obligation to finish.

The details and pace vary, as they will across eight seasons. What carries through is the difficulty of making a decision when the evidence is incomplete and the consequences may be enormous. The programme can change its immediate subject without losing that source of tension.

That gives it longevity without requiring every new problem to be a bigger version of the previous one. A change in who can be trusted may be more effective than a change in the size of the threat.

The argument doesn't end when the operation does

The intelligence work gives Homeland a way to ask what loyalty actually requires. Loyalty to a colleague, an institution or a country can point in different directions. The characters have to live with the decision rather than settle the question in a clever speech.

I don't watch it as a guide to how the real intelligence services operate. It is a drama, with the compression and heightened situations that entails. What works is the feeling of people trying to act within an organisation that has its own pressures, habits and competing interests.

That stops the story becoming a simple contest between the clever officer and whoever is obstructing her this week. People can care about the same outcome and disagree profoundly about how to reach it. Those disagreements give the tension a life beyond the immediate crisis.