Reinventing Homeland

“I don’t think I ever really care to watch Homeland again,” the Slate critic Willa Paskin wrote, saying she had “lost faith” in the show’s “ability to be coherent”. The disrespect was new for a show once so hot that President Barack Obama requested screeners to watch in the White House, and once so honored it was given the Emmy for best drama after its first year. In what might have been the low point, the series was excluded from last season’s ferociously competitive Emmy field for best drama.

“We love our show, and we bleed for our show,” said Alex Gansa, a creator of Homeland. “So when there is a degree of criticism, it can’t help but hurt. And the lack of an Emmy nomination really hurt.” But he added: “I’m unable to watch the show objectively. So I look at season 3, and I choose to focus on the strengths. I love those first four episodes and the way we brought the season home.”

Claire Danes, who has won the best-actress Emmy twice for her portrayal of Carrie, defended what she called “a beautiful season”. She added: “It was a long game the writers were playing. I think maybe some viewers felt excluded in the reveal after the first four episodes. I thought it was a thrilling magic trick. Some viewers might have felt it was a gotcha. But that was never the intention. It was to surprise and show Saul’s brilliance.”

She acknowledged that Homeland was a “high risk” enterprise because later episodes are being written even as the first ones are shown, and the end of each season is not determined beforehand. This “flying by the seat of our pants” approach, as Gansa put it, allows Homeland to stay remarkably close to unfolding events in real life, even appearing prescient at times, Danes said.

But the risks can sometimes take a toll, as Gansa explained: “You’re making so many decisions and so immediately that you’re bound to get one or two wrong.” He added, “If I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn’t have given Dana Brody a love story last season. I would have done something else.”

The absence of Brody will hang over the new season, Danes said, and not just because she will miss playing opposite the Emmy winner Damian Lewis. Their characters’ baby will be a major theme, Danes said, and postpartum depression will be added to Carrie’s challenges.“That naturally interests me, just because I’m a new mom,” she added. She and her husband, Hugh Dancy — of NBC’s Hannibal — have an 18-month-old son.

So how is Homeland being reinvented? Gansa said he decided to take his characters “to their real milieu, to a place where they’ve been trained to operate”. Though Carrie was last seen being promoted to CIA station chief in Istanbul, now she is heading the operation in Kabul, and running into tension with the US Embassy in Islamabad.

With Lewis gone, Mandy Patinkin’s role as Saul — now out of the CIA and relegated to work with a private contractor — will take on greater weight. “He’ll do anything to save his metaphoric child, Carrie,” Patinkin said, “because he feels she’s the ticket, no matter what her struggles or troubles are.” The show originally planned to shoot in Israel, but then reconsidered because of uncertainty about events there. Danes said Turkey was the next choice until the production learned that the Turkish government was insisting on vetting every script that might contain “an unflattering depiction of Turkey”.

So South Africa — Cape Town, specifically — is standing in for both Afghanistan and Pakistan.Viewers will again find in Homeland parallels to real events in the Mideast, Gansa said. Drone and airplane attacks, terrorist cells and embassy security all play a role in the season.

There were suggestions that Homeland was an inspiration for videos issued this summer by the Islamic State. An article in The Daily Mail speculated that the group included scenes that imitated the show’s choppy opening credits. “I think that’s nonsense,” Gansa said. “But I don’t think it’s nonsense that these terrorist organisations are using social media in very sophisticated ways.”