Homeland As Moral Wasteland
via No Heroes, No Villains: Homeland’s Moral Confusion « Acculturated.
Showtime’s terrorism drama Homeland is the television king of the hill. For its inaugural season it recently took the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, and Best Actor and Best Actress awards for its two leads. The final episode of season one was the most-watched finale of any rookie Showtime series, and it just kicked off its highly anticipated second season. But underneath its polished production values and top-notch writing is a moral muddle that may undermine its dramatic impact in the long run.
For those who haven’t been following–SPOILER ALERT–the show centers on a U.S. Marine named Brody (actor Damian Lewis), missing and presumed dead in Iraq since 2003, who is rescued and brought home to Washington D.C. to a lot of CIA self-congratulation and media fanfare. He rides his war hero popularity all the way into political office and by season two he is a Congressman being courted for the presidential running mate.
But that’s not all he is. CIA analyst Carrie (Claire Danes) rightly suspects that Brody is a sleeper agent here to carry out an attack from terrorist mastermind Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban). That makes Brody a rather unique protagonist–“a whole new breed of lead character,” as the Los Angeles Times put it, “neither antihero nor villain.” Nor hero.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
The Manchurian Candidate: The TV Show
Only w/o Frank Sinatra… and a clear moral focus, apparently.
That’s one side of the show. Carrie (Claire Danes) is the other more engaging and original side. I don’t mind its ambiguity. Its ambiguity is part of show’s motif.
If anyone is drawing a blank on the name Damian Lewis, he played Captain Dick Winter, who was arguably the lead character, in Band of Brothers. He also starred in Life, which ran two seasons, where he played an LAPD detective who had spent 12 years of a life sentence in prison for a crime he didn’t commit before being exhonerated and returning to his job as a detective. Life was relatively-successful ratings-wise but got cancelled when NBC decided to try running Jay Leno in prime time.
It’s even worse than has been described above. I wrote about HOMELAND here: http://clarespark.com/2012/09/23/homeland-and-the-idea-of-the-fifth-column/. It was written and acted by those who point to American atrocities and warn against those who exaggerate the war on terror, by making the Muslims sympathetic and provoked. Liberals all the way. But the writing is effective and the acting very good.
The popular series “Breaking Bad” is the very definition of moral muddle. A chemistry teacher turned meth dealer is the sort of “hero”.
Old Soldier wrote: A chemistry teacher turned meth dealer is the sort of “hero”.
Judging from what I’ve seen of the teacher’s unions, it’s probably an accurate portrayal of them.