Previewing Homeland

The most obvious theme of the fall season are retro hot chick jobs from the sixties, but a more rampant theme of this fall are shows that sound like a good idea for a movie but how do you make it into an actual series (shows that fall into this category include Terra Nova, Ringer, Revenge, Persons of Interest, A Gifted Man, midseason shows like Apartment 23, Bent, Awake, The River and let’s not forget Heart of Dixie which was actually a movie, but was called Doc Hollywood back then). You can extend that to cable with Showtime’s Homeland.

The show follows Claire Danes (The Mod Squad) as a CIA operative who gets some questionable intelligence that Al-Qaeda had turned a prisoner of war and is convince that long presumed dead Marine sergeant Damien Lewis (Robinson Crusoe) who is found alive after eight years in captivity may be some sort of Manchurian Candidate. Much like Jack Bower before her (the show is from the creators of 24), Danes goes further than the Patriot Act would allow to see if her suspicions are correct much to the dismay of her old boss and mentor Mandy Patinkin (Alien Nation) who is still dealing with his superiors at how Claire got her original intel in the first place.

Also having rough time with Lewis’s return is his family who has long thought he was dead. His daughter has reached the rebellious phase and his son is too young to even remember a time when he was around. His wife Morena Baccarin (whose hair has thankfully grown out to a much hotter length than her time on V, but still kind of still looks like an alien) has even moved on since her husband had been declared dead and naturally she started hooking up with his best friend Diego Klattenhoff (Mercy).

If gaining intelligence from someone about to be executed in exchange to keep his family safe, Danes is also facing her own demons that may stem from her blaming herself for not stopping what happen on September 11, 2011, but may actually go back further. Homeland plays like a less heady and more action version of AMC’s short-lived intelligence based show Rubicon. As great as the first fifty minutes of the premiere episode is, I really did not like the ending (which I really cannot explain why without giving away major spoilers). If Homeland was a one hundred minute movie and what happened and the episode was actually the start of a third act of a movie, I would be fine, but it seems like they are showing their cards way too early for a twelve episode season. Hopefully they prove me wrong for the second episode.

Homeland airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.