National Insecurity

The post-9/11 era in TV began before 9/11. The pilot for 24 was shot months before the attacks. It debuted weeks after them, and Jack Bauer became a fantasy figure of certain, if brutal, protection. For the next decade, terrorism drove fantasies like Alias and dramas like Sleeper Cell; the Twin Towers haunted the backstories of shows from CSI: NY to Fringe.

In the same way, the post-post-9/11 era in TV began before the death of Osama bin Laden. Showtime ordered its new thriller, Homeland, well before SEAL Team 6 took out the al-Qaeda leader in May. But the questions the series raises reflect a decade of post-Bauer change: Will this war ever end? Has 9/11 made us more vigilant and pragmatic? Or has it left us–like the principals in this absorbing, nuanced drama–damaged and maybe a little crazy?

Homeland (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), adapted from an Israeli series, is produced by two 24 veterans, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. But while this show’s stakes are similar–a possible terrorism attack on U.S. soil–it’s deliberate instead of frenetic, psychologically brutal instead of physically bludgeoning, cerebral instead of agitated. It asks questions first and shoots later (if ever).

The opening sequence is straight out of 24, yet not: a CIA officer is stuck in Baghdad traffic, trying to get to a prison where an intelligence contact is about to be executed. Bauer would have made the drive hell-bent, in clock-ticking real time, L.A. freeways be damned. This agent–a Westerner in a hijab–abandons her car, oblivious to the trapped drivers behind her, and walks. At the prison, she gets the tip she’s after: an American POW has been turned by terrorists.

Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) doesn’t throw a punch or get in a car chase in the captivating early episodes of Homeland. Her weapons are her chisel-like focus and blindness to social and political niceties. When a POW, Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Band of Brothers’ Damian Lewis), is rescued in Iraq after eight years, only Carrie asks the uncomfortable questions: Why was the U.S. fed the tip that freed Brody? Why was he kept alive at all? She suspects him of being a sleeper agent; her colleagues treat her like a crank, a madwoman.

Which, to be fair, she may be. Carrie is hiding a psychological disorder, popping the antipsychotic clozapine on the sly. Danes plays her with a quasi-ecstatic intensity: she could be an unheeded prophet or an unhinged fanatic, the latter possibility underscored when she has Brody’s home illegally wired with cameras and mikes.

In Homeland, observation is action. We become voyeurs with Carrie, spying signs of a conspiracy–or violating the privacy of a hero in his home. We find that Brody’s wife Jessica (Morena Baccarin), believing him dead, has been sleeping with his friend and superior officer. His kids hardly know him. And Brody, played by Lewis with thrumming bitterness, seethes at his captors, who abused him, and the government, which wants him to re-enlist for p.r. reasons. (“Bin Laden’s dead,” an officer says in the second episode. “Now America thinks–or wants to think–that this war is drawing to an end.”) Brody is also lying about the details of his captivity in ways that are explainable either by a terrorism plot or survivor’s guilt.

Like last year’s short-lived Rubicon, Homeland is an intelligence story about the limits of intelligence; it’s a paranoid thriller in a truer sense than 24 ever was. We never doubted Jack Bauer’s gut, however many twists the show threw at us. Homeland offers no such assurance. Instead it gives us Carrie and Brody in a claustrophobic, circling dance. They meet only once, but their connection is intimate. Staring dispassionately at her video monitor, she sees him wake from nightmares begging someone, in Arabic, to kill him. Even if he has been turned, he’s not evil; he’s damaged. He makes rough love to his wife–eerily, with Carrie watching–in a way that suggests his capacity for connection may be broken.

Carrie too acts out sexually; a loner, she prowls bars wearing a wedding ring to weed out men looking for commitment. Danes’ performance recalls her Angela Chase from My So-Called Life after a couple of bad decades, and I mean that as a compliment. Carrie is like an adult teenager, wild-eyed and fiery in her conviction that no one is listening to her. She alienates even allies like her spy-sensei mentor Saul (Mandy Patinkin), so driven is she by her guilt at having missed clues before 9/11. But in her fervor to make things right, is she seeing things–not unlike, say, the phantom WMD in Iraq–that aren’t there?

Like other terrorism serials, Homeland could have a hard time sustaining its themes over years. But for now, it’s fascinating. It could end with Carrie’s revealing Brody as a terrorist’s brainwashed pawn. Or it could redeem him as simply another soldier broken by an ordeal and show Carrie to be the well-intentioned Javert to his Valjean. But either resolution invites the same question: Is this victory?