Entertainment

Crazy for ‘Homeland’

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Here’s one for the billboards: “Homeland,” Showtime’s edgy, edge-of-your-seat series, is, bar none, the best thriller on American TV.

This review could/should end here but, since we have newspaper pages to fill, I’ll fill you in on the who, what, where and why “Homeland,” which is based on the Israeli series “Prisoner of War,” is so good.

Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is a psychotic CIA agent who has managed to keep her condition from the brass by getting anti-psychotic meds in a way that would get her thrown out on her CIAss if they found out.

The series opens with mentally unstable Agent Mathison on the war-torn streets of Baghdad.

She’s trying to make a deal for intel with an about-to-be-executed prisoner. He tells her something in exchange for getting him sprung, a deal upon which Mathison can’t deliver.

What he whispers at the last second is, “An American POW has been turned.”

Fast-forward to months later in DC. The brilliant, if anti-social, Mathison, who lives and breathes her job, is in trouble. When she bribed her way into that prison, the ramifications caused an international incident, and she’s been grounded to headquarters.

Now, this could be a trite scene — bad girl/super agent in trouble again but she’s too slick to let it stick — blah, blah. But it’s not anything even close to that.

For instance, to keep from flipping out altogether, she only knows how to tart up and pick up one-night stands at jazz joints.

With only one ally, Saul Berenson (an excellent Mandy Patinkin), left at the agency, off-the-rails Mathison even tries something with him that’s so inappropriate, he nearly abandons her, as well.

Enter homecoming hero, Marine Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), who for the past eight years has been MIA and presumed dead.

We learn through flashbacks that he endured torture by al Qaeda so severe that Torquemada would have been impressed. Warning: These are some of the most realistically horrific scenes you have ever seen on American TV.

While the whole country is celebrating the miraculous rescue, Mathison isn’t buying it. Could Brody be the one who was turned? Is he a terrorist?

Meantime, Brody’s wife, Jessica (Morena Baccarin of “V”), has been keeping the home fires burning, although much too hotly of late.

His and Jessica’s kids, are conflicted. Chris (Jackson Pace) was so young, he has no idea of who the man he has to call “dad” is, while disgruntled, pot-smoking teen Dana (Morgan Saylor) just wants to disappear rather than live with all the publicity.

Meantime, despite being on the thinnest ice possible with her boss, Chief Estes (David Harewood), crazy Mathison pays her rogue contact to install surveillance cameras in every room of the Brody house — including their bedrooms and bathrooms.

Sgt. Nick Brody’s — and Mathison’s — increasingly erratic and irrational behaviors, interspersed with his terrifying flashbacks, aren’t like anything you’ve seen. Or hopefully not– because you’d have to have been a POW of al Qaeda yourself. Don’t miss it.