Seldom in the history of cable TV has a series imploded as quickly as Showtime’s “Homeland.”
Once a critical darling — and the winner of a richly deserved 2011 Emmy award for Best Drama — “Homeland” was an exciting and extremely well-acted exploration of terrorism that centered on a handful of compelling human beings with manageable personal problems.
The show, in the middle of its third season, is now impossible to take seriously.
The danger signs were all there in the final episodes of Season 2, when the writers launched the ridiculous and hopeless story of “My boyfriend, the terrorist” or “Kiss me again, you suicide bomber.”
We were asked to believe a series of ridiculous premises: That there would be no security officers around the vice president’s office, enabling Brody (Damian Lewis) to go in there and murder him, and that Carrie (Claire Danes) would neglect to tell her superiors at the CIA that the vice president had just been killed by her boyfriend, the terrorist.
From that point on, Carrie’s credibility as a CIA agent and as a character was ruined.
End of show? Hardly. Danes won a second Emmy for her performance as cray-cray Carrie, and the producers seemed to have fixed the show’s problems in the third-season premiere, which featured the formidable Sen. Andrew Lockhart (Tracy Letts, brilliant) heading up a hearing on the disastrous bombing of the CIA which killed 200 people while exposing Carrie’s “involvement” with Brody.
Those who may have thought the old “Homeland” was back were fooled. We were asked to believe that Carrie’s being locked away in an institution — because she was flapping her gums to the press about CIA secrets — was all an elaborate ruse cooked up by her and Saul (Mandy Patinkin) to smoke out an Iranian terrorist named Javadi.
So now mental illness is just a plot device for the writers, who think that bipolar people can just act nuttier and then dial it back at will. And we’re also supposed to believe that Carrie agreed to get locked up in a loony bin with a bunch of really crazy people while she was pregnant?
Yes. In a “Knots Landing” moment, Carrie — a woman who would sleep with a UPS delivery guy if he rang her doorbell at the right, unmedicated moment — has found out she is with child: she has an archive of pregnancy tests in a drawer under the bathroom sink.
So who’s the dad? Carrie’s beloved Brody, the killer of the vice president? Or is it her f- -k buddy from the convenience store, whom she robbed after her most recent booty call?
Maybe we should ask Joan Van Ark, who went through this thing all the time as the equally cray-cray Valene Ewing on “Knots.”
If “Homeland” was just another cheesy network show written by a bunch of LA hacks who don’t care what they throw against the wall, fans and critics wouldn’t feel so let down. But “Homeland” was supposed to be different, and it was. It was great. No more.
This season, we have the inexplicable secondary story of Dana Brody’s (Morgan Saylor) identity crisis, which gives new meaning to the word “snore.” Most disturbing are the scenes of nauseating violence, particularly in Episode 6, where Javadi killed a guest star who had about three lines of dialogue before cutting her neck to ribbons with a broken bottle. Hey, if I want to throw up on my living room furniture, I’ll just stick my finger down my throat, OK?
“Homeland” has been renewed for a fourth season, and it’s anybody’s guess what they’ll do to keep this thing going. Lewis has wisely stayed mostly out of it, appearing in only one episode. Perhaps Sen. Lockhart will rectify matters when he takes over the CIA. But he surely won’t include losers like Saul and Carrie on his team.