Homeland is famous for two things: Claire Danes’ capacity to act by wobbling her face, and being maddeningly uneven. Terrorists come and go: who could tell a Bibi Hamed from a Saad Massoud in the long game? But inconsistency remains. So as the show resumes later this month, when you look at it across six seasons, is Homeland actually any good? The question has never quite been resolved. Until now. Six seasons, one metric. Goodness.
Season one
UPSIDE
What’s striking now about Homeland’s debut is how slow it is. Rather than what it became – a frantic hail of bullets falling amid a fog of sarin gas – this is a psychological turn about the alienation of a returning PoW.
DOWNSIDE
A climax that’s a touch random. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) attempts to turn the vice president into strawberry jam with his suicide vest, before mammalian evolutionary programming saves the day, via a last-minute phone call from his teenage daughter – as if The Godfather climaxed with the Monty Python foot coming down on Michael Corleone.
Verdict: 57% good
Season two
UPSIDE
A smooth tension between plot and action. For instance, hapless killing machine Brody nips out to stab his bomb-suit tailor in the woods while still on the phone to his wife. In the pivotal interrogation scene, dark arts master Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) stabs Brody in the hand.
DOWNSIDE
The love arc. The grindingly inevitable grinding scene. The closer the pair get, the more you realise they are both ghastly narcissists who should get the chair just on a precautionary principle.
Verdict: 57% good
Season three
UPSIDE
The blood is up, the gore is coming thick and fast. Opens promisingly with Quinn killing a child instead of the Langley bombing mastermind. This horror is quickly superseded when new baddie General Akbari (Houshang Touzi) bashes his ex-wife’s throat with a broken bottle. We are introduced to F Murray Abraham’s deliciously amoral Dar Adal, and, in one of TV’s greatest public hanging love stories, Brody is sentenced to death in Tehran, as a pregnant Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) does her best wobbly-face.
DOWNSIDE
Iranians? Nukes? The sense of a knock-off 24 is starting to grate, and suddenly we are a long way from the pathos of a returning PoW. Brody is packed off to Iran to do some Seal stuff not long after he has been held hostage for a second time, because he is definitely not volatile or anything. Meanwhile, the scriptwriters have doltishly placed Carrie in Iran like a Sim, where she idles uselessly until her big hanging scene.
Verdict: 12% good
Season four
UPSIDE
As an exporation of the tribal zones between Afghanistan and Pakistan, season four sheds light on one of the most knotty and underlit corners of US foreign policy.
DOWNSIDE
The internal logic of every character is now visibly flaking. New mum Carrie does what most new mums do when they go back to work – eases herself back with a posting as a CIA bureau chief in Kabul. Saul Berenson ( Mandy Patinkin) turns up in Islamabad to help Carrie, but, as a highly experienced CIA veteran, is immediately captured by a band of terrorist yahoos. He ends up as part of a humiliating prisoner exchange, which he theatrically flounces out on, only to be saved by a stale Hollywood pep talk about believing in yourself.
Verdict: 16% bad
Season five
UPSIDE
Given that it was released in September 2015, season five’s theme of Isis attacks in Europe would become sickeningly relevant by the year’s end. Berlin provides a refreshing series base after such a sustained period of sand and muezzin wails. Plus, the incidental characters – from Russian double-agent Allison Carr (Miranda Otto) to enigmatic billionare Otto Düring (Sebastian Koch) – are subtly played, grownup.
DOWNSIDE
A series in which Quinn is executed in the terrorist gas chamber, before being revived with the injection of an antidote is never going to be overly sensible. And, in that vein, the final cliffhanger over his mortality has hammy airs of Who Shot JR?
Verdict: 42% bad
Season six
UPSIDE
This was the first season in which Danes wasn’t nominated for an Emmy. But it wasn’t for lack of pouting. The unravelling and long-awaited death of Quinn in a hail of bullets gives the series somewhere to go.
DOWNSIDE
In the annals of Dewey Defeats Truman, season six’s decision to cast a president clearly based on Hillary Clinton, and set itself between election day and inauguration day was quite a gaffe. Still, you work with what you have, and, here, what you have is a sprawling, often dreary plot about domestic terror, with lashings of presidential assassination that uncannily, some would say lazily, echo the Brody era.
Verdict: 43% bad
The result
The final score – arrived at by a method as scientific as any CIA lab full of spinning DNA helixes matching on computers – is thus 126% good and 101% bad. If you exclude the first two seasons, the score for good falls to 12%. Can a seventh season about redneck militias stoking revolution change that? We are several garrottings and much wonkish realpolitik dialogue from finding out.
- Homeland season seven begins on Showtime at 9pm ET on Sunday 11 February in the US; it starts on Channel 4 at 9pm on Sunday 18 February in the UK
