Showtime’s Golden Globe-Winning ‘Homeland’ Isn’t Another Anti-American Show – Yet
by Cam CannonKregg Janke makes a very compelling case that the Showtime series “Homeland” is anti-American propaganda. After thoughtful consideration, I disagree. Not vehemently. But I disagree.
Janke could turn out to be right, and I will look like a sucker. Which is fine. Maybe I am a sucker, but there are worst things that being a plain old sucker…or are there? My overall point is that we’re one season in on a series that is an unfolding drama. Things that seem anti-American now might not be in the grand scheme of things.
Even with that qualifier, I don’t think Season One of the show is anti-American.
Spoilers Aplenty Ahead
As the series opens, CIA field agent Carrie Mathison (a seriously, ridiculously superb Claire Danes), learns from an imprisoned CIA asset in Iraq that an American P.O.W. has been turned by Al-Qaeda. She thinks nothing of it because there was no reason at the time to believe that Al-Qaeda had American POWs, much less that one had been brainwashed.
But then a Marine named Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis, also great), is rescued in a Delta Force raid on a compound owned by a vile terrorist named Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban). Carrie immediately suspects that Brody is the Marine who has been turned. She scrutinizes his every move, gesture and tic, bugs his house with the help of Virgil, a surveillance expert (scene-stealer extraordinaire David Marciano). No one believes Carrie, least of all her immediate superior Saul (Mandy Patinkin, soooooo good), and he doesn’t even know she’s on anti-psychotic medication.
Brody is a reluctant hero. He comes back home to a family who thought he was dead. His wife (alien Obama stand-in Morena Baccarin) is sleeping with his best Marine Buddy Mike (Diego Klattenhoff), his daughter’s a budding pothead, and his son, um, takes karate. Brody doesn’t easily slide back into domestic life. And he is, in fact, a Muslim who sneaks into the garage at night to kneel toward Mecca.
Which doesn’t necessarily make him a sleeper agent, except that he is. In the series most unconvincing turn, Carrie meets him, clumsily, and falls in love with him, even more clumsily. He tells her that Abu Nazir offered him aid and comfort, “And I loved him for that.” At just that moment, Carrie learns that the long-thought dead Tom Walker (Chris Chalk) — Brody’s partner who was also captured — is alive. And he’s the terrorist.
Most Americans believe that in the War on Terror we’re the good guys, and it’s pretty cut and dry. But human emotion and conflict muddy the waters. Fairly late in season one, we learn how Brody was turned. Abu Nazir pulled him from a hole and offered him a nice place to live. Nazir asked him to teach his son Issa to speak English. He grows close to the son, and mourns when Issa and 81 other children are killed in a drone attack ordered by current US Vice President William Walden (Jamey Sheridan). Watching the news footage, Nazir sneers, “And they call us terrorists.”
To me, the irony of this and other emotional complications is the heart of the series. The death of 82 kids is certainly tragic. Brody had a personal connection to one of them that, for him, was larger than the War on Terror. But while I can recognize the tragedy, I can’t claim the same emotional connection to the kid. Furthermore, I’m not convinced Nazir was really mourning the loss of his son. At that moment, he knew he had Brody. He couldn’t connect with 300 Million Americans, but he didn’t need to. He just needed one.
Brody’s relationship with Nazir isn’t all lollipops and sunshine. Nazir has Brody convinced he killed Walker, and when he finds out Walker’s alive, he is justifiably angry with Nazir. But Nazir consoles him and brings him back into the fold. Nazir’s relationship with Brody is one built on false pretenses, and I’m hoping that this will play into the series in season 2.
The emotional bonds shared by many of the characters complicate this particular front of the War on Terror. Virgil helps Claire illegally bug Brody’s home because they’re friends. Saul indulges Claire because of their history. Her other superior doesn’t indulge her because of their very different history.
Even when things are black and white, complications ensue.
Janke took issue with the series finale, in which Brody films a martyr video, blaming VP Walden for the death of 82 kids. The video has not yet been exposed, and I think it’s going to be exposed only when Brody has switched back to the good guys. I’m pretty convinced he’s going to realize something awful about Nazir, and the video will become a liability for him. Another of Janke’s complaints was a particular line of dialogue uttered by VP Walden. When Saul takes Walden to task for ordering a drone attack on a school, Walden says, ““Don’t cloud the issue. If Abu Nazir is taking refuge among children, he’s putting them at risk, not us. It’s our joint opinion the potential collateral damage falls within current matrix parameters.” Saul is disgusted, and apparently so was Janke, but you know what?
I think the VP is right. It’s cold, it’s vicious, but…as I recall, we haven’t yet learned how America learned of Nazir’s location. What if Nazir wanted the attack to happen? What if he was grooming Brody all along?
Perhaps I’m totally wrong, but the first season of the show was exciting enough for me to tune in for season two so I can see where they take us. I’m not going so far as to say the show is conservative, but I’m not ready to call it anti-American, either.
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22 Comments
I tried watching this, suffering through 4 LONG eps, and beyond any pro-terroristic feelings or not, it was a tremendous BORE! I stopped after that, those eps are still available on my On Demand, in HD, but I got no interest. Sorry, Showtime-I'll stick with the tried and true, like Californication, lol!
Not having seen the show, I am getting VERY tired of actors portraying Marines who flaunt our hair grooming standards (Nicholas Brody…and you too, Bruce Dern), and even our height and weight standards ( we don't have fat Colonels, Forest Whittaker).
C'mon Hollywood…do some research already, or just look at a recruiting poster. It's not that hard.
I'm reluctantly staying with the show into next season, partly because Damian Lewis won me over as Major Winters in Band of Brothers and partly because I really want this to NOT be the same anti-American garbage every other show does. I'll probably be disappointed…but I'm a conservative so…just another day.
Regarding the drone strike and Issa, if the writers had decided to set it up so that Nazir out-and-out faked the drone strike in order to turn Brody, that would have really been interesting. They'd already set it up by showing that Issa was absolutely TERRIFIED of Nazir, implying that he really wasn't Nazir's son.
But no, they had to go with a standard "Law And Order: Kabul" script.
Plus, they didn't show Claire Danes' boobies all season, so that's another black mark.
I thought this might be a good program, but I immediately became bored with all the extra stuff they added to make the chicks tune in. For example, the love triangle with the wife's ex lover and all the daddy issues with the kids resenting their dad being gone for so long. It's the same garbage every time. You would think one of the producers would just say, "look, all the cool spy stuff should be enough to keep people interested." So, I stopped watching after the first episode.
Sounds like crap to me. I don't want to watch any show with radical Islamists in it, especially a terrorist with a heart. I hear enough about their nonsense on the news every day. Their motivations don't interest me because their grievances change by the day. One day they are mad about Israel, the next it is something else. They hate, they kill us and their own kind every day, radical Islam is a mindless death cult, the end.
"I’m pretty convinced he’s going to realize something awful about Nazir…."
I'm pretty sure that every actual marine who in real life even stepped a foot in Iraq knew before he got there that there is "something awful about" every one of the leaders of Al Queda. Not to mention every soldier, airman, seaman….
The disrespect the show has for the military is palpable – not one, but two marines are turned, one after being forced to beat his comrade to death (as far as he knew). How many US prisoners of war in Viet Nam killed their fellow captives after years of imprisonment and torture?
I knew lots of guys when I was in the military who hated Clinton. Not a one of them would have killed a single person to teach the US a lesson, let alone strap on a suicide vest.
The show is intentionally anti-American, but backfires like so much Hollywood agitprop by revealing more about its creators, than the targets of its derision.
so far the only actual terrorists we've met in Homeland are the 2 US Marines, a blond American girl next door type and her Arab lover that she led astray.
Oh yea, just like real life. Not Hollywood anti-Americanism at all.
It's a good show but leans pretty left. Check out the intro. They have every President except GW Bush. Pretty astonishing when you think 9-11 occurred while he was President.
Count me in the sucker department on this one. Which is a total contradiction because I 86ed my movie package and Showtime got tossed out with the bath water. (thanks for the spoiler alert Cam) So I've actually taken the bait but I still don't have the hook.
Are they going to release season one anytime soon? I'll buy at least season one to get the last image in my head of Claire Danes in a wheelchair OUT of my head. Please. Claire. Be a trouble maker who gets wrongfully accused of running dope in Thailand or a CIA field agent or SOMETHING. (Pause)
Of course they won't release season one anytime soon and probably Cam & I will ultimately look like suckers on this one except I'll still be stuck with the paralyzed Danes and Cam will eat crow on Page 15 after the story about a traffic accident in Reseda. Talk about winning and losing.
But "Homeland" would be the biggest loser if they show their true colors. They can't hide Progressivism. Ever since they called the Independent Counsel investigating Bubba a racist without knowing – OR CARING – dude married a Jewish woman and had African-Americans in key positions, I've been an expert at calling their bullchit.
Hiding Progressivism is like them pretending we don't know how it all ends with Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. We'd like to think the producers of "Homeland" and Claire Danes have grown up by now. Wouldn't we? My green is still in my jeans. It's up to them to get it.
I noticed that, and made a point of mentioning it to my sig other. I didnt like that, either!
What are you talking about Claire in a wheelchair? Do you mean Temple Gradin, lol?
This is Chick crack, basically. Lewis's character is the chick, who falls for the dominant guy who dominates him as a "POW" (in real life, we have had LOTS of guys who were completely tortured and abused, and none turned). But it is a chick's idea of what war and POWs are like, and what Marines are like (in real life they are the guys who pee on dead Taliban, and good for them).
This is one long, tedious, female version of "spot the Alpha." Which is the head terrorist guy. The show is made for a female audience (that's about 80% of tv viewership these days) and women lean far left on that and other issues because they have no clue. There is a word for people interested in military history, national security, and so forth. They're called "Guys."
Lewis is playing the villain, but he's bad so the heroine falls for him. Because he's bad. Like a soap opera with national security buzzwords. That's Homeland.
So this follows the Alpha/Beta male paradigm. The terrorists for the show writers/heroine are Alpha, because they're always right. No matter what they do. Because dominance and violence are sexy for women, in men. The US Govt. and the Vice President is bad because he's unsexy, a guy who got there by VOTES and politics not climbing over dead bodies (as in the dominant jihad master). It is so ultra-predictable and boring.
Sidenote: most of what passes for politics in the US is really about identity, culture, and non-stop gender/sex-status wars among upper class Whites. Other sidenote: Damien Lewis is too pale, red-haired, and cerebral an actor to be allowed to play good guys in America. In America, our audiences (ESPECIALLY TV) demand a "Big Man" dominant style of acting, ala Robert Downey Jr., or Hugh Laurie, or David Caruso. Quieter guys like Lewis have a problem, female audiences don't perceive them to be masculine enough and thus the hero. Particularly true if they are pale. Even worse with red hair. "Big Man" style is not indicative of being bad, Downey is fantastic, but in TV the female audience gets what it wants and so far it wants (for now anyway) Big Man style stuff and not quieter guys who don't radiate uber-masculine domination. If I were Lewis' agent, I'd look at scripts where he plays a guy who is both quiet (his wheelhouse) but visibly dominant (the lead on NCIS whose name escapes me).
Lewis is a great actor wasted in this. Clare Danes is not. She's boring.
Absolutely love this show and have never received so much hate in my life after I defended it from Janke's TERRIBLE review.
A lot of people on this site just bought into Janke's BS argument that this show was anti-marines, anti-American. It COULD turn out to be that this is the case for Homeland, BUT, that viewpoint was never presented in the first season. And I have no idea where the second season is going. Just got my father and brother into this show, both conservative, and they got hooked immediately,
Just REALLY good television, though if you are looking for violence and 'splosions, you will have to wait til episode 8 of Season 1 (12 episodes in total) for that stuff to happen. Up until then, the show centers around Carrie uncovering the terrorists plans, and trying to figure out for sure if Brodie is a terrorist.
At LEAST give this show a chance. Just great stuff, with some real cliffhanger endings.
I'll pass.
I thought showing how an ivy league educated rich girl could turn terrorist was an atypical touch for Hollywood.
Hey, you thought just like me… it seemed OBVIOUS the kid wasn't the terrorist's son. And that the compound intel had been leaked to provoke the attack.
That had to be part of the set-up to get Brody and the kid to bond because he was going to be killed, thereby creating the conditions to manipulate Brody into carrying a terrorist jihad attack — for the kids doncha know.
That makes total sense, psychologically and dramatically.
For that NOT to be the plot, we have to buy that Brody was kept alive for, what 5 years before being mysteriously selected to teach the terrorist's son English, who then just happened to be killed thus offering Nazir the idea for his dastardly plot.
Maybe that denouement is Season 2, for Brody to discover.
Even if you hate the show, the panic scenes where Brody tries to detonate the bomb in the bunker are sweat-inducing terrific.
Plus the slimy VP is a total Biden.
Exactly right. The show tried too hard to be "24" AND "Army Wives" AND daddy issue show AND The West Wing political show. It couldn't do any of them right. Pick one and go with it.
If we're led to believe Brody is a Benedict Arnold, then why do we care — why are we emotionally invested — in his trials at home with his wife?? I want the jerk dead. And it's creepy when a Marine turned Al Qaeda sleeper is hooking up in the backseat of a car with Claire Danes. The writers on this show aren't seeing straight.
Rush Limbaugh was promoting this show recently. He and his wife sat through a marathon of the shows from Showtime VOD.
I had the same reaction every week during the intro–every president but GWBush is presented chronologically.And Saul's investigation of the drone attack and portrayal of the VP.
But all in all it has really been compelling. Some good sex scenes too.
I agree with you, Janke's review was terrible, and completely off the mark. I love this show, it's a psychological thriller with a lot of nuances, which makes it too complex for most people to understand and appreciate. It was more plausible than 24, and it's about as anti American as apple pie.
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