Showtime’s “Homeland” is a taut post-9/11 thriller

By Jay Bobbin

Only now, a decade after 9/11, would a network attempt a drama series such as Homeland.

Another threat of terrorism on U.S. soil informs the purposely intense, grim Showtime drama series, which premieres tonight and airs Sundays at 10pm ET/PT (Showtime has already posted the pilot episode online, however). Executive producers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa invoked a post-9/11 world in their work on FOX’s 24, but they draw a much more direct bead on the theme as CIA agent Carrie Mathison (played by Temple Grandin Emmy winner Claire Danes) pursues just-rescued American POW Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis, Band of Brothers), whom she suspects turned and is now plotting an attack at home.

“It was more something that we reacted against,’’ Gansa explains, “the idea of being brainwashed or sort of turned in a magical way. It felt false to us, and the issue we wanted to explore was that even if you are turned, you are not really a terrorist until you commit an act of terrorism. You come back from the war, from this captivity, and there are still a lot of questions to resolve in your own mind about whether you might go through with what you’ve been asked to do. That’s where the drama lies, we think.’’

Danes agrees, adding that her Homeland character’s complexity made the project “impossible to ignore’’ for her. “She is at times dangerously bright, and formidable and focused, even compulsive and myopic. But she’s also very sensitive and vulnerable, and that juxtaposition is interesting.

“Actually, my first roommate in college was a CIA officer for a little while,’’ Danes notes, “and she’s the most innocuous, benign person, of course. I was telling her that I was going to play this role — ‘I’m going to play a CIA officer, and she’s bipolar’ — and her immediate response was, ‘Oh, she sounds very isolated. That’s a lonely character.’ And I was like, ‘Yep.’ It provides her this incredible perspective and vantage point, but it also causes her suffering, and she needs to resolve that.’’

On the subject of suffering, there’s also Lewis’ role that involves flashbacks showing the soldier’s torture while held prisoner. “I’ve been hung upside down, I’ve been beaten in the head, I’ve been beaten with a club with barbed wire wrapped around it,’’ Lewis reports. “We’re keeping it as real and as brutal as those things are. It’s not for sensationalist reasons. It’s not for shock value. It’s to break somebody physically, emotionally and psychologically so he is then malleable, so it’s important to show it.’’

Also starring Emmy winner Mandy Patinkin and Morena Baccarin (V), Homeland has 13 episodes initially. Gordon maintains he and creative partner Gansa “probably wouldn’t have done it if it had been any more than this number. This is a very deeply serialized drama, and on a normal broadcast schedule, it’s an impossible task. You wind up vamping; here, I think we find ourselves able to tell a complex story, but one that’s just the right breadth and the right length.’’

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© Showtime. Credit: Michael Muller/Showtime