I am not alone in selecting “Homeland” as my favorite new television show from the 2011 season. The show debuted on Showtime on Oct 2, 2011 and recently completed its first season with 12 episodes. Homeland won praise from numerous television critics and newspapers such as the Washington Post, Boston Globe. David Stuever from the Washington Post praised the show for having the “season’s strongest female character.” episode received an impressively high score from Metacritic. It scored 91 out of 100 from 28 critics. TV Guide named it the best show of the season and Homeland has been nominated for numerous awards by the Golden Globes Awards and the Writers Guild of America Awards.
“Homeland” has garnered so much acclaim and praise for a number of reasons; interesting plot twists and turns, strong and remarkable characters and acting, a timely theme – the war on terror, and a sophisticated and thoughtful approach to deep and probing questions of good and evil. The general premise of “Homeland” is America’s war on terror. The show revolves around two main characters; a CIA Agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and an U.S Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damien Lewis). The premise of the show is that Mathison, who had conducted an unauthorized operation in Iraq, is passed information that an American prisoner of war has been turned by Al-Qaeda. Mathison is reassigned to the CIA’s Counterrorism Center in Langley Virginia. She learns that Brody, who spent eight years in captivity in AfganistaMandy Pantinkinn has been rescued. Brody returns to the United States as a war hero but Mathison is convinced that he is the American GI who has been turned.
“Homeland” is great television on a number of levels. On the one hand, it is simply great television; interesting plots, twist and turns, surprises and the unexpected cliffhanger that catches viewers by surprise and makes them hungrily wait for the next episode. On the other hand, Homeland is thought provoking and not merely entertaining. It shuns the jingoism that accompanies similar themed shows. It raised troubling issues. First and foremost is the morally ambiguous relationship between good and evil. It turns out that Sergeant Brody is engaged in a plot for Al-Qaeda but he is motivated by noble reasons; avenging the murder of innocent children. So it turns out the Carrie Mathison’s intuitions about Brody were right but at the same time she ends up falling in love with Brody. Another interesting feature thrown into the mix is that Carrie is bipolar. She obviously keeps this fact hidden from the CIA, including her mentor and confidant Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin). Carrie’s struggle with her mental illness plays an intricate and integral part of the show and that makes the moral stakes even more ambiguous and confusing.
While the show’s focus is on the Claire Danes and Damien Lewis characters, the relationship with the other characters heightens the tension and quality of the show. Brody’s teenage daughter Dana (Morgon Saylor) is intuitively aware that something is not right about her father. He confesses to her that he has become a Muslim after discovers him praying in Arabic. Saul is torn between his faith in Carrie and his discovery that she is bipolar.