Gareth McLean
11:00 AM, 19 February 2012
Even if Barack Obama hadn’t mentioned in a recent magazine interview that Homeland was his favourite television series, the taut thriller starring Claire Danes and British actors Damian Lewis and David Harewood would have attracted attention, not to mention critical acclaim and awards – like the best drama trophy at last month’s Golden Globes.
That’s because it’s compelling, complex and absolutely addictive. Plot It tells of Nick Brody (Lewis), a US marine freed after eight years as a PoW in Iraq, and his pursuit by Carrie Mathison (Danes), a possibly unstable CIA analyst who is convinced that the man the rest of America imagines a hero, brought home with much patriotic pomp, is actually a terrorist, “turned” during his incarceration.
As an increasingly rogue Mathison instals surveillance equipment in Brody’s home and watches his and his family’s every move – especially those of him and his wife – we see a man ill-at-ease in a country he finds alien, a family struggling to cope under extraordinary circumstances, and an examination of the loneliness of the woman watching them.
Homeland (shown in America on cable channel Showtime, also home to Nurse Jackie) is as much a personal psychodrama as it is a political thriller. All of this is captivating enough, but the fact that Homeland also earned the epithet of “Obama’s favourite drama” has brought it added cachet. New York Times columnist and liberal doyenne Maureen Dowd describes it as “a master- piece of paranoia”, a detailed portrait of an American psyche changed by 9/11, and wondered just how much Obama’s enjoyment of it revealed about his foreign policy.
Read the rest of the article: http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2012-02-19/homeland-stars-damian-lewis-and-david-harewood-on-the-hit-us-drama
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