Homeland Review

The first two seasons are as good as the paranoid thriller gets on television. Claire Danes plays Carrie Mathison as brilliant and unwell in the same gesture, Damian Lewis keeps Brody genuinely unreadable for far longer than the premise should allow, and the show takes outstanding drama series along with both lead acting Emmys on the strength of it. Mandy Patinkin's Saul is the steadying counterweight, a spymaster who loves her and uses her, and the interrogation scenes between Danes and Lewis are the high point of the run.

Then the machinery takes over. The third season hands enormous weight to a teenage subplot the audience openly rejected, the fourth resets the entire show in Islamabad because the original one has nowhere left to go, and from there each year restarts with a new country and a new conspiracy while the actual argument about American intelligence gets thinner. Reviewers who called it the best thing on television in 2012 spent the middle years hedging, and the reception settles into respectful disappointment before the eighth season pulls off a genuinely strong finish.

Politically it takes fair criticism for its treatment of the Muslim world, which the later seasons acknowledge more than they fix. The look is handsome and anonymous, competent location work with no visual voice of its own. What survives is Danes. She is the reason the plot grade sits below the overall and the reason anyone kept watching anyway.