Homeland lost me when Carrie started her affair with Brody. It stopped being convincing , but somehow, I am now sitting here watching episode two of season five. Why? Claire Danes is phenomenal as Carrie, but the character mostly grates. Mandy Patinkin really gets into Saul, the former CIA director, but his moroseness is a blunt knife. The writing is so so. The story jumps around. And the image above of the blond woman in amongst the backs of black-clad Moslem women is troubling. It is just a thriller now. Nothing has to make sense in a thriller, so long as it is exciting. The show has it’s really tense moments, and because it does in a way what Law and Order has done at its best, taken stories of the moment. Beyond that it shows both sides of the suffering that the Western response has caused in the Middle East even to those who perpetrate it.
