I finally watched (most of) the first season to find out what the fuss is all about, and I was underwhelmed. The first few episodes were pretty good, but then it devolved into soap opera level contrivance and twists and double twists for their own sake. I guess the thin veneer of solid acting and production values has a lot of people fooled into thinking this is more than pulpy airport fiction.
I liked it alot, but I started watching it before I heard of the Hype
what shows do you like?
If you think the first season eventually devolved into stupidity, don’t even try to watch the second.
I never know what other people expect from television series, but I think Homeland is one of the greats!
If you have ever read any espionage/spy thriller novels, you will find similar plots and twists and surprises. Are these “real”? Well - some of it could be, other parts might stretch the imagination, but that is why they are considered fictional entertainment and not documentaries or historical bio pics.
I would venture to guess that many might have thought of Sopranos as an over-the-top mafia soap opera, or think The Wire was just some urban street pulp fiction about low-lifes - but you either buy into the premise or you don’t.
So, still not sure what you were expecting in a series based around a terrorist/mole/CIA and politics, but I think Homeland has done an excellent job in keeping the action moving at a good clip, and throwing in some unexpected surprises along the way.
But hey, each to their own. I personally hate any films/series with zombies or vampires and consider them utterly ridiculous - but they get good box office and high ratings, so what do I know?
I don’t read espionage/spy thrillers. That’s totally cool for anyone who does get into that stuff, but I was led to believe, with all the hype from critics and the awards, that this was on a higher plane than a book you’d find at an airport gift shop or wrapped up in a beach blanket next to the suntan lotion.
My top five shows currently airing (that is, not yet done with their run even if they are on hiatus ATM) would be Breaking Bad, Girls, Louie, Community, and Parenthood. Past faves include Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, The Larry Sanders Show, The Office (UK), Da Ali G. Show, The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, In Treatment, The Wire (though I have only watched the first season so far), Firefly, Stargate Universe, and the first season and a half* of BSG.
This is what I’ve been reading! I sort of sniffed things out online to see if maybe it got better in the second season (which sometimes happens, like with Parks and Recreation); but it seems there are a lot of people who are like “I used to be able to take this show seriously, but now it’s gotten way absurd”. So, yeah, I figure it would just be even more ridiculous now if I delved back into it, kind of like that show *Revenge *(which my wife–she of summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and two master’s degrees, yet–somehow loves, and I have to stifle snickers at when I happen to be in the room while she watches it).
*Through “Resurrection Ship (Part 2)”, which is where I would implore anyone to stop if they were checking out this show for the first time.
ETA: I did think the first half of the first season of *24 *was pretty cool, but that it got really stupid and overly twisty after that (the Nina “reveal” was a huge shark jump IMO); so this is just par for the course I guess since it’s the same crowd making it from what I hear.
I don’t know. I think maybe you were expecting something that Homeland wasn’t trying to deliver. The first season was about Carrie dealing with having a mental breakdown, and as such, did a good job of painting that picture. It’s not a procedural. It’s about the people, and the characters in the first season were some of the most nuanced and well developed that I have come across on television in recent years. It may not really have been realism, but that clearly wasn’t the point. It was about conveying a sense of mania and panic so that you can get a look inside Carrie’s head as a person on the edge of a psychotic break. If you don’t dig that, that’s cool, but take it on its own terms before you decide it’s over rated.
Also, Homeland featured (and continues to feature even though season 2 sort of lost its way) some of the finest acting I have ever seen on television. Mandy Patinkin deserves every award they can throw at him for what he is doing on that show just with his beard, and the rest of the cast is doing a stellar job as well. Claire Danes is quite possibly the most gifted actress of her generation, which is saying something.
What do you mean when you say it’s “soap opera level contrivance and twists and double twists for their own sake”? It has been a while since I watched the first season but I recall everything being very logically constructed with one even following the next fairly sensically. The twists were always of the “I didn’t think that would happen yet” variety not of the “what?!” variety. The outlandish stuff all had to do with Carrie’s illness, but again, that’s sort of by design since it is the portait of a person with severe bipolard disorder being pushed to the edge of her sanity.
Otherwise I think their abilty to create an edge of you seat thriller in an even slightly unconventional molde is impressive. I mean, if I am remembering right, they tell you Brody is a terrorist in the first episode and never *ever *contradict that. It’s a neat trick that they were able to do that and then keep the suspence up for a whole 13 hours of TV.
That’s entirely possible, but the critics and the awards made me think otherwise. Not the showrunners’ fault, I suppose.
Maybe the very end of the season was about that, but before then the only level at which they showed anything about mental problems was her periodically popping a pill and talking with her sister about her condition. “Show, don’t tell”, was not followed for most of the season.
You say that like I was looking for a procedural when those are a genre I generally detest. I have seen enough of them though, at older relatives’ homes, to say that part of the problem is that it does in some ways resemble a glossed-up, sexed up, pay-cable version of a CBS procedural like NCIS. Don’t all those shows have an older, slightly curmudgeonish (but with a heart of gold) mentor figure like Saul?
I would dig that, but it wasn’t what I saw in the nine episodes I watched. Lodge Kerrigan has made a couple indie films that effectively explore that territory (*Keane *and Clean, Shaven); I didn’t see anything like that in Homeland.
Good acting requires good scriptwriting (including consistent characterisation) to have any real meaning. There have been strong moments viewed on their own, but wild plot twists and inconsistent or illogical behaviour to advance the plot have undermined the characterisation and thus my appreciation for the acting.
Take Patinkin for instance. He is enormously appealing, I agree. But for several episodes Saul freaks out when Carrie steps even moderately out of line; then when she admits the most egregious act of all (sleeping with Brody), he pretty much shrugs and pats her on the shoulder. Danes’ Carrie is savvy and very careful, until she needlessly spills the beans at the cabin that Brody is a target of investigation–and compounds the error by admitting it’s just her theory and the rest of the CIA doesn’t buy into it. Wha?? Then Brody goes home and cries, as though he is genuinely wounded by Carrie’s suspicions; the next episode reveals she was right all along, thus all the emotional meaning of that performance is sucked out.
I’ll let a far better writer than I, James Poniewozik of TIME, take this one–even though he clearly still likes the show more than I do:
Tiresome.
Then of course there’s the aforementioned fellow POW and good friend Walker, who Brody thought he had beat to death but actually hadn’t (classic soap opera plotting there), who showed up panhandling right in front of the U.S. Capitol (LMAO). Oh, or the season finale (I didn’t watch it, but read spoilers), in which Carrie realises she was right all along just before she conveniently gets amnesia–another trusty soap opera plot device.
Twists and turns are supposed to be exciting, but it’s kind of like stores having BIG SALES: over time, as everyone tries to compete with everyone else’s “sales”, they become commonplace, people expect them, and they become routine, part of the landscape.
Sure they do. Having Walker be “the POW who was actually turned”, and therefore having Saul and Carrie declare him innocent, but then later saying “oh, btw they were both turned”, was a cheat toward the audience.
*I think it’s worth going back to that earlier review in more detail, to note more fully just how much Poniewozik did get the rug pulled out from under him:
That wasn’t my intention, I was just taking a guess at what you might have expected since what they presented didn’t seem to be it. I wasn’t trying to box you into a particualr genre, I was just trying to create a contrast with the genre that it was using as inspiration. And I agree, it uses the trappings of a procedural. The “twists” all come from playing against what you would end up expecting in that situation.
I am going to rearrange some of your post at this point.
I never once had that reaction to the show. The reveal of Walker, Brody protesting his innocence, none of that changed the fact that they had told us that Brody was a terrorist already. The most they ever did was have me doubt for an episode, but watching it in its initial run I was always as certain as Carrie that she was right and everything else was just the plot being revealed fully. So maybe that’s where I was watching a different show.
[quote]
Take Patinkin for instance. He is enormously appealing, I agree. But for several episodes Saul freaks out when Carrie steps even moderately out of line; then when she admits the most egregious act of all (sleeping with Brody), he pretty much shrugs and pats her on the shoulder. [/qutoe]
I can’t speak to that specifically since it has been too long since I watched the original series, but my memory of that is different. That said, I tend to seperate a performance from the writing. For me they are very different things so let’s move on to Dane’s.
This is where I would like to go back and point to my previous thesis that the show is about someone with bipolar disorder starting to go off the edge. The whole thing at the cabin, the whole cabin trip, is Carrie starting her breakdown. I never took Brody crying as him being hurt by her accusations, but again, I always believed him to be a terrorist so, different show.
I disagree. It would be soap opera if Walker’s death was important to the audience. It wasn’t. It was only important to Brody. The important point is that Brody had been made to think he commited attrocities already, making it easier for him to kill himself and commit further attrocities. Walker not having been killed does several important things for Nazir and makes logical sense if you buy the terrorist plot at all.
This isn’t really what happened and the resolution of the ending is one of the things season 2 did really well. It was more like The Wire where the good guy loses because there are too many cards stacked against him and not enough time.
I would need to rewatch to get into it further, but I think there is a real difference between using familiar tropes to create cognative dissonance in an audience and playing on old familiar cliches. You say they are doing the latter, I say the former. I am probably not going to convince you otherwise.
Don’t you think at all that the more widespread critiques of Season 2’s wild implausibilities retroactively vindicate my perspective on S1? Maybe my BS detector is set to a more sensitive setting than most people’s (and if so, I’m sure it’s due in no small part to getting badly burned by LOST).
No, because they’re talking about season 2, and you’re talking about season 1. It might be a serialized show, but season 1 is surprisingly self-contained, with its own arcs in terms of both plot and characters. If you didn’t like it, that’s fine, but think of it like this: just because The Godfather III was bad doesn’t mean that the first two weren’t great.
I’m really surprised that you don’t see Carrie’s mental state as a key part of the show. For me, that’s always the specter hovering in the background. When she starts to get really revved up about something and Saul has to talk her off the ledge, that’s her having a manic episode. Emotionally, she’s all over the map, and other characters sometimes walk on eggshells around her and question her fitness to do her job when she’s not around. During the first season, I was constantly wondering if she was going to be pushed over the edge by the emotional toll of her job and by the decisions (both good and bad) that she had to make. Is she doing this because she really thinks it’s the right thing to do, or is she having some kind of emotional break, and if so, is it going to push her over the edge this time? That’s absolutely the core of Homeland for me.
And just for the record, I thought the first half of the second season was terrific. Cracks definitely started to show (and widen) in the second half, but that first half is easily equal to the first season, IMO.
I did not read the replies so I have no idea if my experience resembles what some others may have felt.
I accidentally found the final episode of season 2 while channel surfing. I had no idea why everything happened the way it did without a back story history, so I was intrigued.
As a result I watched the episodes of both seasons. Some episodes are better than others, but overall it is an interesting show. I am not really sure where they can go with it now, but I look forward to next season to find out.
So while the series is no St. Elsewhere, it is not bad either.
Sure seemed to me more like Carrie was always right and Saul was always wrong (though understandably so). I’d be revved up too!
Except she’s actually doing her job better than they are. How is this different from Jack Bauer, not diagnosed with anything but always in trouble and seen as unfit, but who is actually more on top of things than anyone else?
I loved that show way back when! I recall very little about it though and am not sure if I’d still feel the same now.
If that was sort of the general consensus on the show, or there was a wide variety of opinion about it, I wouldn’t make it my mission to be the wet blanket for everyone who liked the show. I generally leave people alone about their shows–I know someone who loves her some David Boreanaz on Bones, and hey: go for it, who am I to judge right? But what sticks in my craw in this case is that this show gets so many awards and plaudits–it’s really treated as the second coming–and it is just not all that.
No. Season 2 was about Brody in the same way that season 1 was about Carrie and I don’t think they knew what do with his family to get them to where they needed to be by the end of the season without doing some stupid stuff, and that is unfortunate. It felt as though there wasn’t really a plan for season 2, while in contrast season 1 fit together like a novel with every piece having a place and purpose and with everything being through plotted and set up several episodes in advance.
In that was Season 2 was a lot like Lost (which never had a plan) and that’s a bit disapointing. It was fun, but got sort of fluffy. Season 1 still holds up in my mind, but I may have to go watch it again to be sure. You have such a different impression of it than I do that I am starting to doubt my own memory.
I’m with you. Watched the first season and finished it just out of habit, no interest in continuing.
For me I think there’s a fine line between “interesting” and “ludicrous”. A story has to be just out of the ordinary enough to be interesting, but not so zany with plot twists that there are no longer any “stakes”. * Mad Men* failed the first test, in that the story seemed plausible and the setting realistic, but I just don’t give a shit about the story or the characters enough to keep watching. Homeland fails the second test, in that there are so many wacky twists and implausible turns of events that the story was no longer interesting - if absolutely anything can happen, then there is no more reason to care about anything in the show.
As an example Breaking Bad manages to walk this line fairly successfully.
I believe St. Elsewhere is still popular in reruns and will stand the test of time. It was so well written, acted, and character driven, it won numerous awards despite not having top ratings for the masses. Then again shows like Two and a Half Men and something called Honey Boo Boo(sp?) seem to appeal to the masses, so go figure.
As to sticking in your craw, I understand what you mean, hence my comparison to a show like St. Elsewhere that was certainly worthy of the accolades bestowed upon it. Homeland is no St. Elsewhere, so no matter how good it may be, that much is certain.
This is the part I am confused by. Not anything can happen. In season 1 the events that did happen are the only logical way things could have played out. Again, Brody was shown to be a terrorist from episode 1. Everything else was just filtering through the shower of information. It’s one of the things that I thought was so brilliant about the show, and I am surprised that it is being called out as having crazy out of left field twists and turns.
Can you give us some examples of what you consider to be good drama series?
I think the core of it remains very smart, but it suffers from the writers not being able to plan far enough ahead - S3 was only agreed mid way through S2, you can’t write like that.
The moral ambiguities are definitely cleverly drawn and take several shapes: Hey, you’re romantically rooting for an amoral (murder condoning, torturing, etc) woman and married, suicide vested Congressman - or is she working for the state terrorists and he …
You also have the weird stuff - Bradley Manning in the form of a blonde woman, Hezbollah bizarrely teaming up with Al-queda, a sulky, angsty teen who is literally the only moral compass of the whole piece …
It’s different, anyway.
That might be a good idea. With both LOST and BSG, going back and reflecting on it I see the shark jumping coming a lot earlier than I was able to perceive at the time.
Sounds like we have pretty similar sensibilities. I too found Mad Men surprisingly uncompelling even as I can appreciate its very high level of attention to detail, good acting, gorgeous cinematography, etc. And I adore Breaking Bad.
John Mace, I detailed my tastes in TV up thread.