This is Debrief, the UK blog about the award-winning television series Homeland, starring Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, Morena Baccarin, Mandy Patinkin and David Harewood MBE. Produced by Fox for the Showtime cable network in the US, it’s shown over here by Channel Four on Sunday evenings at 9pm.
This is still a work in progress with a few teething problems, the aim is to get up and running fully by episode three.
Sky have announced that they’ve acquired the rights to Hatufim (Prisoners of War), the original drama upon which Homeland is broadly based. The ten-part series, written and directed by Gideon Raff, was voted Israel’s number one drama in 2010 and will be shown for the first time in the UK on Sky Arts 1 HD in May.
Although Homeland only used the Israeli series as a starting point upon which the 24-style espionage thriller was built rather than directly remaking it, it’ll be interesting to see the orignal show which was critically acclaimed at the time of its broadcast.
Starring Edna Blilious, Yaël Abecassis and Mili Avital, it tells the story of three IDF reservists who are captured in Lebanon before returning seventeen years late, two alive, one in a coffin. Going back and forth between three points in time – before the abduction, during their time in captivity and after their release – we see how the survivors attempt to reintegrate into society while slowly discovering more about the secrets of their time as captives.
The acquisition was part of a raft of announcements from the channel, including the return of Michael Parkinson to TV and an original drama series, Playhouse Presents.
The first episode of Homeland was a dense, fast-paced thriller featuring a stand-out performance from Claire Danes as CIA officer Carrie Mathison.
The episode starts in Iraq, as Carrie bribes her way into a jail to try to get some information about a possible attack from a bomb maker who is due to be executed. He whispers in her ear that an American prisoner of war has been turned, something she immediately discredits because there are no Americans being held. Ten months later, she turns up late for a briefing at the CIA Counterterrorism Center in Washington where Director of Counterterrorism David Estes (David Harewood) announces that Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a US Marine who went missing in Iraq eight years ago and has long been presumed dead, is rescued in a Special Forces raid. Carrie immediately puts two and two together, telling her mentor Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) that she suspects Brody of being the convert to al-Qaeda she was told about. Because she has little evidence and Brody is being greeted by America as a returning war hero, Saul tells her to back down, knowing the CIA will not support any investigation.
Another person surprised to hear of Brody’s return is his wife Jess (Morena Baccarin), who we first see in bed with his best friend Mike, a fellow Marine. She’s tied a yellow ribbon around a tree outside the house, told the world she won’t give up hope and even shunned the wife of Tom Walker, the Marine who was captured together with Brody, for remarrying but clearly she is starting to move on, spending lots of time with Mike and preparing to tell her children that he’s about to move in. Sergent Brody calls to deliver the news himself and his shocked wife races home to tell their somewhat stereotypically rebellious teenage daughter Dana and sweet-natured son Chris, who barely remembers his father.
As his family, the Vice President and the world’s press gather at the airport to greet Brody with a hero’s welcome, Carrie breaks into their home to set up an unauthorised surveillance operation, installing hidden cameras and microphones with the help of Virgil, and old friend whose services she’s used in the past, and his brother Max. She returns home to watch their every move, including some unromantic, grunting lovemaking which helps to show that, terrorist mole or not, Brody has gone through a hell of a lot and is not the man he was.
The next day, Saul manages to get Carrie into Brodie’s debriefing where she aggressively questions him on his first days in captivity, asking about terrorist leader Abu Nazir who he says he has never met. We see in flashback that he is lying, he did meet him when he was being held, but David angrily asks her to back down. After leaving the debriefing, Brodie calls his wife to tell her he’s still going to be there for a while, something the eavesdropping Virgil takes as a sign that he’s on his way to meet his terrorist contact. But instead, he meets Helen, Tom Walker’s wife, to help her come to terms with the loss of her husband, answering her questions about how he was beaten to death when he was in another room.
We learn a lot about Carrie in this episode and she’s shaping up to be one of the most fascinating female leads on television. There’s some kind of history between her and David which ended up with his wife leaving him. Max finds a bottle of anti-psychotic drugs in her bathroom, which she says she uses to treat a mood disorder she’s been keeping under control, and keeping secret, for many years. Perhaps the most remarkable moment comes when she returns home to find a disappointed Saul waiting for her, saying that he’ll have to report her surveillance operation to the authorities, and she makes a terribly desperate and unsuccessful attempt to seduce him. That night she goes out, wearing a wedding ring so she can pick up a guy who doesn’t want a relationship, and suddenly comes to a realisation. As she watches the fingers of the jazz band in the bar, she sees that Brody was tapping out a pattern with his fingers every time he was on TV. She takes this to Saul who agrees that this is just enough to buy her a bit more time.
The episode ends with Brody out on an early morning jog, as we see flashbacks that reveal that he was the one who had beaten Thomas Walker to death as Abu Nazir looked on. Menacingly, as he finishes his jog, he looks up and stares at Washington’s Capitol building.
This was a compelling start to the series, utterly absorbing from the start and full of twists and turns that took me from believing Carrie’s suspicions to doubting them and back again. It’ll be interesting to see how many more twists follow in the weeks to come.
Welcome to Debrief, the brand new UK-pace blog about the acclaimed television series from the Executive Producers of 24, Homeland. Produced by Fox for the Showtime cable network in the US, it’s shown over here by Channel Four on Sunday evenings.
A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to BAFTA’s swanky London headquarters for a screening of the first episode followed by a Q&A with it’s British stars Damian Lewis and David Harewood MBE. The drama about an American Marine’s homecoming after years in captivity and the CIA officer who believes he may have been turned by the enemy and poses a terrorist threat has won critical praise and 2011 Golden Globe for best television drama series. The pilot episode is one of the best debuts I’ve seen for a while, it drew me in very quickly and introduced the characters in some depth early on.
In a few ways, this feels like a more grown-up version of 24, and not just because being made by a cable channel rather than a network means it can have nudity and swearing. As much as I absolutely loved 24, it did often help to switch your brain off while watching, while Homeland seems a lot more intelligent and based in reality. It’s also got a tremendously interesting lead character in Carrie Mathison, who takes anti-psychotic medication and is only interested in men who want one-night stands, a stand-out performance from Danes. Damian Lewis is also excellent as Brody, a man who, whether a terrorist mole or not, clearly has gone through hell for the past eight years. There are no shoot-outs or explosions (in the opening episode, at least) but there are a few things that would be familiar for fans of 24 – the sense of a ticking clock towards a terrorist attack, the surveillance operation with cameras and microphones around the suspect’s house, and our hero having to secretly do their own investigations because their superiors won’t listen to their instincts.
At the screening, Lewis explained how he was excited by the script because of how dense it was in incident and character, while Harewood said he was attracted by the kind of strong black role that is not often found in the UK. When asked why we do not often have similarly strong series over ten-plus episodes here in Britain, Harewood suggested that there is currently a lack of ambition in the industry. Lewis put it down to the difference between British television’s theatrical traditions as opposed to the Hollywood background of American TV, as well as (perhaps more pertinently) the huge gulf in development and pilot budgets.
Homeland is a fantastic series that definitely goes in the “don’t miss” category. There are twelve episodes in this first season, meaning it’s not the 20-plus week commitment some American series are, and a second has already been ordered.
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