* Now’s as good at time as any to say I’ll be covering Homeland Season Two for Rolling Stone, I guess. That also makes it a pretty good time to watch Season One, for the very first time.

* Homeland is, in its way, part of a genre that’s very near to my heart: haunted suburbia. Alyssa Rosenberg once made this exact point about the show, in fact. The pilot episode’s winter-gray palette of cloudy skies, streets lined by leafless trees, dingy snow on asphalt driveways, people looking out windows into backyards and so on was all awfully familiar to me, and I’m the sort of person who…I don’t know, feels there’s probably something awful beneath the familiar. In the Washington suburbs that’s literally true, of course, since decisions to kill people are made in homes and offices like these all the time. I’m happy to see a place like that played as a source of dread.

* What a terrific germinative moment for this series: A condemned man who’s killed hundreds of people whispering a pivotal, lifechanging, potentially catastrophic phrase into the ear of his wild-eyed nemesis as she’s forcibly whisked away. We don’t hear what he said. We can only take her word for it. It turns out that she was right, but by hiding the actual sound of his voice from us the show lets us know that she will always be second-guessing herself, always have that wide-eyed look of “Did I just hear what I think I heard?”

* Another great nightmare moment: Carrie in the briefing room, fear creeping across her face while everyone celebrates. To be Cassandra, to be Kevin McCarthy in in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that’s bad juju.

* The final moment that sold me: Sergeant Brody crying after he finishes beating his partner to death. The worst thing about torture is the breaking of people, and even if Brody’s al-Qaeda brainwashers were able to put him back together in a new and terrible shape, he’s still broken. I like that the show allowed for that moment, showing he’s not the smirking villain he appears prepared to become as he stares at the Capitol dome in the distance — he’s a man who just did the worst possible thing the old version of him could ever imagine doing, and there’s enough of the old version of him left for the new version to be sick about it. (Which is still the case as he throws up while his plane prepares to land in the States, come to think of it.) Actor Damian Lewis has the look of a character in a just-okay network cop show, and I’ll fully cop to responding to actors on a purely surface level first and foremost, so he had the most work to do of anyone on the show to get me invested. He certainly did in that scene.

* The funny thing is that even aside from my own aesthetic biases, it seemed like he’d have the toughest role of anyone in the cast regardless. Since it appeared as though the show would be about figuring out whether or not he’s a double agent, I figured that I’d spend an entire season poring over this guy’s every facial expression, every movement, every blink. Instead the show does the big reveal almost immediately. That really surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Resting the show on an out-and-out mystery puts too much pressure on that mystery to deliver its resolution and then go no further. They’ve got a lot more flexibility with Brody’s true nature out in the open (for us at least). And this is not to say that Brody might not harbor some doubts about his mission, which will help the character maintain some air of uncertainty.

* This is going to sound weird, but was I the only one who caught a Stephen King vibe from this? In Brody I saw echoes of that manchurian-candidate Dead Zone character; in the treatment of the ‘burbs I saw Derry and Jerusalem’s Lot and any other place pervaded by evil and reluctantly, frantically protected by the one person who can see the forest for the trees.

* Very, very excited to be watching a Great TV Drama with a female antihero protagonist. Excited it’s Claire Danes, too, whose face seems like it was carved out of marble to play exactly this kind of high-stakes, high-strung operative at the end of her rope.

* I’m also excited to be watching a war-on-terror show that, despite being more explicitly about the war on terror than any other, seems at least somewhat determined to play that conflict as a nebulous and shadowy one, in which secret societies meet in secret rooms to determine the fate of millions, on either side. Everyone’s so busy refining genre art down into mere allegory that they forget you can also inflate allegory into genre art.

Tags: Homeland, reviews, TV, TV reviews

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