Five Reasons I Won’t Be Watching Season 2 of Homeland

by Conroy

On Sunday, the critically acclaimed CIA/terrorist drama Homeland will begin its second season on Showtime. It’s a well-timed return as just this past week Homeland was the toast of television, triumphing impressively at the Primetime Emmy Awards¹, winning outstanding series, lead actor (Damian Lewis), lead actress (Claire Danes), and writing, all in the drama categories. An impressive feat considering the competition included shows as lauded and accomplished as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Downton Abbey.

For those of you who haven’t seen the first season…spoiler alert…it centers on the efforts of a rebellious CIA officer, Carrie Matheson (Danes), investigating a rescued American POW, Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Lewis), just returned from Afghanistan after eight years in captivity. She believes that Brody has been “turned” by his captors and is now a Manchurian Candidate-like Al Qaeda sleeper agent. She battles to convince her increasingly skeptical superiors of her heterodox theory while also struggling with her personal instabilities, including crippling bipolar-ism. She’s right though, Brody has been turned. We see him ping-pong between a devastated POW trying to reintegrate into his old life and a hidden terrorist planning an attack on American soil.

Danes is a superb actress and her work in Homeland is worthy of awards. For his part, Lewis does a fine job as a man torn between radically different desires. And both are supported by a strong cast, most notably Mandy Patinkin as Saul Berenson, Carrie’s CIA mentor and moral guide. The shows are well directed, the production values are high, and there’s a lot of interesting and fairly convincing through-the-looking-glass detail about terrorism and modern intelligence work. To put it simply, the show has a lot going for it. It’s already the most watched program in Showtime’s history, and with the Emmy attention and strong word-of-mouth, the second season is expected to capture the eyes of a much wider audience. But not mine.

I hereby submit that Homeland is in fact a bad show, and offer five reasons why I won’t be watching season 2.

Where’s the FBI?
The show depicts the efforts of Dane’s CIA officer and many of her colleagues to investigate, interrogate, surveil, bug the property of, and spy by various other methods on: Sgt. Brody, foreign diplomats, other American citizens, suspected terrorists, to name but a few, each one living/residing in America. The CIA may be metonymic for the entire spook community and all its covert activities, but this is not what the agency does. Investigation of suspected criminals in America is the responsibility of law enforcement agencies, not intelligence agencies. While the CIA would have an interest in suspected terrorists and terrorist organizations in the U.S., the investigations, arrests, and prosecutions would be led first and foremost by the FBI (and supported by local law enforcement and other Homeland Security agencies).

The FBI is largely absent from Homeland, and when present is shown as a hostile obstacle to Matheson and her colleagues. It’s no secret that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies have struggled to get along and share information, both before and after 9/11, but what’s shown in Homeland goes way beyond reality. And so we see CIA officers carrying guns, participating in raids on D.C. buildings, and clearly violating the civil rights of citizens and foreigners. This may be fun for the plotting and action, but it’s another glaring break between Homeland and the realism it claims to portray.²

Citizen Brody

Sgt. Nicholas Brody

One of the major plot developments through season 1 was the rise of Sgt. Brody from war hero to politician. By the end of the season Brody was on the cusp of being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Supposedly, his being a war hero with a great story of perseverance and survival, and having a beautiful wife and picture perfect children is enough to convince the Vice President’s Chief of Staff that he should fill a soon-to-be vacant House seat. Are we really expected to believe that this is how politics in 21^st century America works? Brody is a sergeant, which means he likely doesn’t even have a college education. He’s not a lawyer or business man. He has no fortune or insider connections to the types of money and influence needed to organize a political campaign, garner needed support, develop an agenda, etc. He has no public service background³ or political experience. In other words, he’s a pure amateur without any of the advantages that amateurs need to win at the highest level of American politics.

Perhaps the writers thought of John McCain when developing this plotline. He was (McCain) a POW who returned to America after a long, brutal captivity to become a famous politician and run for President. But McCain was a pilot who graduated from the Naval Academy and was the wealthy son and grandson of four star admirals. After returning from Vietnam, McCain was a naval liaison to the U.S. Senate where he gained his first entre into politics. He was politically connected as witnessed by having two U.S. Senators serve as groomsmen at his second wedding in 1980 (and he married into an even wealthier family). Brody has none of these advantages. He’s depicted in the show as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and under the thrall of Abu Nazir, a terrorist mastermind. And the way he’s selected for political office is contrived and over simple. This plotline, which is going to be a central focus of season 2, is unbelievable.

Bad Geography
Homeland is set in and around Washington, D.C. Much action takes place at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, at the Brody home somewhere in suburban Virginia,⁴ in downtown Washington, near one of the region’s airports, at a lake house somewhere in the city’s western hinterlands, etc. Unfortunately for the show, it isn’t filmed in and around Washington. Instead, almost all of the series is filmed in and around Charlotte, NC. This was done because it’s cheaper to film in Charlotte than Washington. The problem is that Charlotte doesn’t look like Washington. Charlotte has skyscrapers, Washington doesn’t. Washington has famous landmarks and monuments, (and at the risk of offending North Carolina readers) Charlotte doesn’t. Washington has a fairly iconic and recognizable look, with its huge public buildings and their neoclassical architecture, low-rise density, abundance of aforementioned monuments, setting on the Potomac, and so forth.

Charlotte, on the other hand, is like many other burgeoning southern cities: its downtown is shimmering and spread out and tall, its density is fairly low, its streets are wide and in a grid pattern. There’s no major waterway, the topography is noticeably different, and so on.

Does this city look anything like Washington, D.C.?

I find these discrepancies very distracting. It’s obvious that the action of Homeland isn’t actually taking place in Washington and that detracts from the verisimilitude of the show. Consider how the spare desert setting of Albuquerque⁵ is incorporated in Breaking Bad, how bustling Manhattan is part of Mad Men, or how the mean streets of Baltimore became a major character in The Wire. Setting matters and faking one city for another doesn’t work when the charade is apparent. If the producers wanted to substitute one city for another – a very common practice in film and TV – then they must do a better job of it. Early in season 1 we saw Brody run by the Capitol. That was effective. Why not more of these small shoots in Washington to bolster the illusion of the events actually being there? By the end of season 1 we see the Vice President nearly assassinated on a downtown street that no one could confuse for Washington, a terrorist interrogated in a high rise that exists nowhere in the Capital region, an airport that in no way resembles Dulles, Reagan, or even BWI. We even see a park that’s supposed to be the Gettysburg battlefield (it’s not). The examples go on and on and I’m sure they’ll carry right into season 2.

Terrorist Brody
The central fact of Homeland is that Sgt. Nicholas Brody is a terrorist. The drama is that only his terrorist masters and a few people at the CIA know it (or think they know it). After being captured by terrorists in 2003 he is physically and psychologically tortured, even being forced to beat a friend and fellow prisoner to death. Finally, reaching his breaking point, he is offered hope. A man is kind to him, gives him food, shelter, a warm bath, and comfortable living conditions. This man is the terrorist leader Abu Nazir. He is generous and civilized towards Brody. Eventually he has Brody tutor his young son in English. Brody develops a close relationship with the boy. One day as the boy walks to school he is killed in a missile strike from an American drone. Brody is devastated by his death. An indeterminate time later, Brody is rescued from a terrorist compound by American special forces. He returns home to a hero’s welcome.

Baltimore on Screen

by Conroy

This week Grantland.com, ESPN’s self-styled “sports and pop-culture” offshoot, is hosting Smacketology [1] an interactive March-madness-style tournament where readers vote on matchups of 32 of the most memorable characters from the acclaimed HBO series The Wire. This tournament exists, I suppose, as a pop-culture anticipation of the upcoming NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament [2], but also because so many of the Grantland senior staff are semi-obsessed with the show, which to be fair, does boast an undeniably impressive roster of realistic, interesting characters. Why else invent this completely meaningless tournament based on a show that’s been off the air for several years?

Of course, just because it’s meaningless doesn’t mean people don’t have strong opinions. From who will prevail (the odds-on favorite [3] is Omar, the homosexual street vigilante), to who was “snubbed” (no Ellis Carver or Rhonda Pearlman?!), to how each character was seeded (Jimmy McNulty is just a “3” seed?). For me, this tournament is nothing more than a curiosity, but I do have one beef. It seems that the tournament committee (or whoever at Grantland put this thing together) made one massive, unforgivable omission, the biggest character of all, the show’s beating heart, the city of Baltimore.

Place as Character
And that leads me to two separate but related thoughts. First, the idea of place, of setting, as a principal character. The Baltimore shown in The Wire is as inseparable from the show as the main criminals and cops. We see the decaying underbelly of the city. The characters inhabit it; they create and are the products of its devitalized social milieu. Dirty streets, boarded-up houses, depressed stores, corners surrendered to thugs and drug dealers. We see the violence that rots the city’s poor (and largely black) neighborhoods. We see the effects of the corruption and bureaucratic malaise, the numbing inertia of large institutions that are incapable of arresting the long social and economic decline of huge parts of the city. This may all seem rather bleak, but the show is vibrant because of its universe of characters and because all those characters lived in a “real” place. A great deal of the show takes place outside, on the city streets, at the port, on rooftops, at neighborhood bars and parks. If the city plays a central role it’s because the show was almost entirely shot on location [4]. David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun writer and the show’s creator, knows Baltimore and its criminal street scene intimately. That realism is transferred to the screen. This is only one view of Baltimore, the saddest parts of the city, but what’s seen on the screen is more or less true.

Joyce immortalized in his Dublin

This reminds me of the way other places have been used to emphasize and enliven great art. A prime example is the Dublin of James Joyce’s stories and novels; Dublin is as much a character in Ulysses as Leopold Bloom or Stephan Dedalus. Joyce famously said, and I’m paraphrasing, that if Dublin were to vanish from the Earth he hoped it could be reconstructed brick-by-brick from the pages of his book. Just note the intricacy of how the Dubliners traverse and inhabit the city in the novel. Even if you’ve never seen Dublin, as I hadn’t when I first read the book, Joyce’s prose renders powerful images and especially powerful impressions in the mind; in the end, the story is inseparable from the place. Joyce’s stories and characters are universal, they convey the human condition, but they’re grounded in a time and place. They’re intertwined with the Dublin of the author’s youth. There are countless authors who, like Joyce, create character from setting, Faulkner’s Mississippi and Dickens’ London are a couple of prominent examples.

Jumping to a different medium, think of Martin Scorsese’s best films, they take place in New York, from Taxi Driver, to Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. And it’s not the glamorous high-rises of Wall Street or midtown Manhattan or the wealthy neighborhoods of the Upper West Side, but working-class sections of the Bronx and Queens; the rough, lonely night streets. His characters are New Yorkers. It’s hard to imagine Travis Bickle, the anonymous taxi driver, prowling the streets of any other city, and of any other city being as hostile and hard on him as 1970s New York. And as Henry Hill says in Goodfellas, “We grew up near the airport [5], it belonged to us.” Indeed the mid-level crimes and heists of Hill and his gangster friends never rise above or beyond the streets of their neighborhood.

Baltimore on Screen
But this leads me to my second thought. As effective as The Wire is in incorporating Baltimore into the story, it shows a pretty grim side of the city. My hometown appears simultaneously dysfunctional, dangerous, and genuinely soul-crushing. Realistic or not, it’s not really how I want the image of the city conveyed to the rest of the world. I admit to a certain possessiveness and defensiveness in how Baltimore is depicted in the media. I suspect this is true of a great many people who take pride in their cities but who live in places that are only sporadically shown in the mass media. Some cities are used so commonly as settings for shows, movies, novels, any fiction, that you can gain a fair appreciation for the nuances of the place: New York and Los Angeles most obviously. Other common settings include Chicago, Washington, Miami, Boston, and San Francisco. London and Paris are popular international locales.  But for cities like Baltimore, such exposure is intermittent and shows like The Wire cast an incomplete perspective.

Time Travel Silliness

by Conroy

The latest time travel entertainment

In a couple of weeks Fox will air Terra Nova, the most expensive television program in history. The show's premise is that future civilization can only be saved by sending humans back 85 million years into the past. I have no idea what in this extinct period is going to save humanity (I'm assuming that will be the ultimate outcome of the show), but such a setting does allow for dinosaurs (plentiful in the trailer) and undoubtedly many other obstacles challenging to modern man. Whatever the details, the program is just the latest in an unbroken string of high profile television shows, movies, and literature based on time travel. Or what I like to call the tired time travel conceit. Tired and preposterous. (It's right up there for me with all those movies where one person's consciousness gets switched into another person's body, or the unending end of the world apocalypse stories.)

The idea of time travel has been around for centuries (if not longer) and its use in fiction became prevalent in the nineteenth century, when the genre was adumbrated by Dickens in A Christmas Carol, then explicitly used by Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and perhaps most famously in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. And these are just the more noteworthy examples. In time, time travel has become even more popular, unfortunately.

Now don't get me wrong, I like science fiction. And I know the whole point of the genre is to take humans to places and times different from the here and now. After all, isn't the point to remove people from the familiar and surround characters with radically different conditions in order see with fresh eyes the realities of the human condition? Or at least pose the relevant questions in a different light? That's the core of science fiction and it makes for some great stories and ideas...but time travel? Really, come on.

Time Travel and Paradoxes

The Terminator sent from the future

One well known example of what drives me crazy about time travel stories is from the Terminator. In the story a war between humans and machines is being fought in the not-too-distant future. The machines utilize time travel to send back an android (excuse me, "cybernetic organism") "terminator" to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of John Connor the human leader, before he was conceived. If the android succeeds then Connor will never be born and the human rebels will be leaderless (I guess). To stop the Terminator, Connor sends back a human to protect his young mother. In the process of the movie, the human protector, Kyle Reese, impregnates Connor's mother -- with Connor. This is a classic example of what is known as a predestination paradox. Reese travels back in time on orders from John Connor, impregnates Connor's mother, who then gives birth to John Connor. If Reese is never sent back, Connor can never be born, and the adult Connor cannot order Reese to go back and protect his mother. There are other examples of this just from the Terminator and its sequels.