World Screen @ 35: Homeland

As World Screen celebrates its 35th anniversary, we want to present a series of articles that recap and highlight the best of the interviews we have conducted. We are focusing on the evolution of scripted TV series.

In our last article, we looked at the phenomenon that was Game of Thrones. HBO was not the only premium cable outlet shaping the cultural conversation. Today, we look at Showtime’s Homeland.

By 2010, industry insiders and viewers alike were all referring to television’s new “Golden Age.” Talent from feature films—actors, screenwriters and directors—were joining projects for the small screen, attracted by the opportunity to explore complex, layered characters—neither wholly good nor completely evil—in 10 or 12 hours rather than 90 minutes or two hours. Following these TV series became akin to reading chapters in a novel, with plotlines and character development carrying over from one episode to another, and this was particularly appealing to writers and showrunners.

“The great benefit of tele­vision is sustained engagement over time for one character, and that can be a very exciting thing for a writer or an actor,” said David Nevins in 2013, then president of entertainment at Showtime Networks. “We’re still in the business of appealing to adults, which is not fundamentally what drives the movie business anymore, and that leads to satisfying and creative work for these actors, writers and directors.”

“When you talk about “The Golden Age of Television,” if you look at a lot of the protagonists in these shows, these are deeply flawed, complicated anti-heroes, said Homeland showrunner Alex Gansa in 2014. “And that character became possible on cable television. You weren’t confined by the strictures of what a hero is or should be, which up to that point on television, there was a tried-and-true formula for that. Cable allowed people to explore what the other side of a hero could be. Up to that point, and I don’t know when that could be, but you could probably point to The Sopranos, a protagonist or lead character had to be likeable. Cable made it possible for a character not to be likeable, as long as that character was compelling. I don’t think it should be understated. It’s a different paradigm, and it allows for more interesting characters.”

Two of the most different and interesting characters to appear on television were CIA agent Carrie Mathison and Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody in the critically acclaimed Showtime series Homeland. It was based on the hit Israeli drama Prisoners of War (Hatufim), created by Gideon Raff, which explored the challenges three Israeli POWs, who had been captured in Lebanon, faced upon returning home and re-entering society.

“The moment I came up with the idea, I was absolutely shocked that no one had done it before in Israel,” recalled Raff in a 2013 interview. “That was part of my curiosity—why had no one done it? What are we so afraid of? In my research, I discovered a world of drama that nobody had tapped into. There are about 1,500 former prisoners of war who live in Israel. We know a lot about their time in captivity. We know a lot about the campaign to get them back. Nobody talks about what happens to them from the moment they’re back home. The idea of making a show where they return in the first episode, not the last one, was a bit innovative in Israel.

“We take to the streets when we have prisoners of war; we demand their return, we fight to get the boys back, the government pays a very high price for their return,” continued Raff. “And I think we need a happy ending, which rarely happens. What I’ve discovered from talking to [former prisoners of war] and their psychologists and their children and their wives and their communities is that sometimes coming back home is the beginning of the journey, not the end of it. For some of them, it was a harder experience than captivity itself.”

Raff was working in L.A. when he had the idea for Hatufim but wanted to make the series in his home country. He contacted Avi Nir, the CEO of Keshet, who immediately agreed to collaborate on the series. Hatufim was the highest-rated series on Israeli television when it aired.

Soon after, the idea of a U.S. adaptation of the series started to germinate.

“Avi Nir pitched it to Rick Rosen at WME and Rick said, I love this idea, and I have the perfect partners for you,” explained Raff. “I translated the pilot episode to English and sent it to Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. They read it, they loved it, and they asked me to translate the rest of the series, and I did. It took me about five days to translate the whole thing. I was so excited that Howard and Alex were into it that I just didn’t sleep! [Laughs] Then we started meeting in Los Angeles and discussing the differences between our cultures and how to best adapt this story to America. I told them, I wrote this show during the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war, and I never saw pictures of coffins on the news. American prisoners of war were never discussed on a national level. Most of my educated, savvy, political friends here in America don’t know that there’s an American prisoner of war right now with the Taliban who has been there for almost three years. In Israel, [prisoners of war are] a huge issue. Israel negotiates for their prisoners of war, so mine came back after a long negotiation. The U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists, and that’s why Brody [Homeland’s returned POW] was released in a military operation. The focus of Homeland is very much on the interrogation; it’s very much on the thriller. In the Israeli show, the family drama is just as important as the secrets they are hiding.”

Homeland was pitched to broadcast networks before finding its way to the premium pay-TV channel, Showtime. It told the story of Sergeant Brody, who returns home, but CIA agent Carrie Mathison suspects he has been turned during captivity and is plotting a terrorist attack on American soil.

“Homeland was originally developed partly with a mind towards broadcast television, so it was both about moving quickly and also about reimagining what the show could be in a pay-cable environment,” said Nevins in 2013. “That entailed making the characters a lot more ambiguous: making the good guys in the script less good and the bad guys less evil. And then moving very quickly in convincing Twentieth Century Fox [which would produce the show] why it was worth their while to come to Showtime. And convincing the producers why it was worth their while to come to Showtime and also showing that we had a good broadcast plan for their show. I knew exactly where I was going to put it, and from the very beginning, I told them that the show would air in the fall of 2011, playing with Dexter on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. That was influential for them when they had choices of where to take it.”

In a post-9/11 world, Homeland tackled the subjects of terrorism, Islam, patriotism, and America’s role in the world at a time when the U.S. was still at war in Afghanistan, and the wounds of that attack on the psyche of the American public and its leaders had not yet healed. The series was notable for challenging assumptions and preconceived notions viewers may have had about hot topics in the news.

Co-creators Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa were grateful for the freedom and support they received at Showtime. I spoke with them in January 2012, when they and the series had just won two Golden Globes: Best Television series – Drama, and Best Performance By An Actress in a Television Series – Drama for Claire Danes. Later that year, Homeland earned six Primetime Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series and for Danes and Lewis for Outstanding Actress and Actor, respectively, in a drama series.

“What Alex and I appreciated, particularly with regard to this series, was what I’d call the rhythm, just the fact that we didn’t have to be interrupted by commercials,” said Gordon in 2012. This show required what we hoped was a trancelike involvement or a spell—not to sound pretentious but for lack of a better word—and we knew commercials would disrupt that flow. So not having to write to those artificial breaks was very liberating and I think was part of the show’s success. Aside from the fact that on a broadcast network show, you probably couldn’t have a heroine who is bipolar.”

Gansa admitted he and Gordon were thinking of Claire Danes when they were creating the character of Carrie Mathison. “We definitely had Claire in mind,” he said. “The minute we actually began to speak of a female intelligence officer, she was the first actor that was in our minds. Temple Grandin had just aired [on HBO], and her performance in that film is just extraordinary. We thought that we were going to have a very complex, interesting character at the heart of this piece, and Claire could be perfect to play it. She was also just the perfect age. There was a lot of discussion when we were casting this role about how old this woman should be. Showtime had a history of casting slightly older ladies than Claire in their shows—Mary-Louise Parker [Weeds] and Laura Linney [The Big C] and Edie Falco [Nurse Jackie]—and they were sort of pushing us in that direction, in more of the Robin Wright age range. We thought that our character should be younger than that, especially because she was so troubled and complex. You feel that the younger she is, the more hope there is that she could get over [her condition]. If there were a woman who was pushing 50 in the role, she would certainly be past the point of real redemption.”

Gansa said the collaboration with Showtime executives contributed several fruitful ideas. “First and foremost, one of them is they pushed us to make Carrie more of an extreme character than she was when we first wrote the script. Although they didn’t suggest specifically the idea that Carrie was bipolar, they said, ‘Look, we need something more, what else can you add to that character. She’s not just a maverick; she’s not just a pariah in the CIA. Is there something else we can add to that character that makes her more alive and more interesting?’ So Howard and I went away and thought about it for a while, and we came back with this idea that she had this bipolar illness, which, again, informed the series on such a deep level, and it was a direct result of Showtime pushing us to be something more.”

Claire Danes was quickly drawn to the project and the Carrie Mathison character. “The pilot was immediately gripping,” said Danes in a 2013 interview. “It was obviously a piece of excellent writing, which one doesn’t come across very often. I was intimidated by it. It was ambitious, and this character was and still is incredibly dynamic and complex and a little difficult. When I get just a little bit afraid, I think, Gosh, OK, fine, I think I have to do it! The pilot was terribly engaging, and I wanted to read the next episode. I believed that other people would feel the same way.”

As for all the roles she takes on, Danes did considerable research to prepare for the role of Carrie. “It was a very interesting little syllabus I put together for myself before the first season,” she recalled. “I did delve into [bipolar disease and the CIA] and found them to be incredibly riveting. I have to tune up every so often; I have to go to that material and remember what I had studied so intensely before we started. But I kind of get it now. It was about seeing her through all these various adventures with as much integrity as possible. These are both subjects that happen to naturally appeal to me. I am interested in psychology. I thought I would be a therapist, actually, if I wasn’t going to be an actor, and I studied a lot of that in college. And the world of espionage is almost by definition totally fascinating and not entirely unrelated to the world of theater, which of course, Argo pointed out so wonderfully. It’s about role-playing and being intensely perceptive.”

Homeland continued the trend in television’s golden age of featuring morally compromised characters whose motivations the audience could understand. Gansa had told the press, “If we get the audience to sympathize with a character who might be a terrorist, then we have succeeded.” I asked him to explain that further.

“We wanted to create a ‘villain’ whose motivation you could completely understand and possibly even root for against your own interests,” Gansa said in 2012. “If we could have pushed it that far, we knew we were in some nice complex gray areas, which is where we tried to live as much as we could in the series. A lot of the credit has to go to Damian Lewis as well because there’s something so winning about him, and to portray a character that actually has some evil intent but maintain that essential [human quality]—you kind of root for him in a strange way. He was able to walk that very fine line.

Homeland was a hit because of the tension and suspense of its plot and the masterful portrayals by actors, including Mandy Patinkin as acting CIA director, Rupert Friend as CIA black ops operative Peter Quinn, in addition to Lewis and Danes. But it also because raised issues that were of interest to many in America and around the world.

“What is interesting for an international audience is the idea of how America should project its power overseas and how that idea is changing in the U.S. ten years after 9/11,” said Gansa in 2012. “What is also interesting is what our role is in the Middle East and our preconceptions of Islam. All those issues are undergoing some serious examination in the U.S. right now, and we were just very lucky to have appeared on the scene at the same time. We were able to parallel those questions that are being debated at the very highest levels of government.”

“At the beginning of every season, we all take a field trip to Washington DC.,” explained Gansa in 2014.” All the writers, and sometimes Claire Danes or Mandy Potemkin or both will join us, and we sit down with all our consultants, that is active intelligence officers, retired intelligence officers, current State Department people, former and current ambassadors, NSA people, occasionally some people from the White House, and we just take the temperature of the town. We get a sense of what is being debated in the halls of power. What are the preeminent issues in terms of keeping America safe, in terms of protecting American power overseas. What are the hot spots? What is being discussed? All in an effort to find out what are the issues we should be talking about in Homeland this season. What are the real conversations that are happening because one of the wonderful things about doing this show is that we get the comment on current events.”

While Danes was also intrigued by these issues, she was also concerned about how the writers would deal with topics like terrorism, patriotism, espionage and bipolar disease. “The show is talking about incredibly volatile themes and ideas and ones that are playing themselves out in real time,” she said in 2013. “It’s risky, and I had to believe that the showrunners and writers would be incredibly responsible and sensitive to the kinds of feelings that they would arouse in people because it’s big stuff. We are talking about some of the fears that are most alive right now.”

As risky as presenting those topics may have been at the time, Showtime’s Nevins wanted the series to stir a response from viewers. “You want to be the show that people are talking about,” he said in 2013. “That’s important to us because we need to keep Showtime top of mind, so people feel it’s a service they have to subscribe to. You never know [if a show is] going to be a big hit. I knew it was going to hit some hot buttons, and it was going to be controversial. I also knew there were lots of things that were going to make journalists want to write about it—it was very topical. And then, in the way that only television can, deep engagement with characters over a long period of time really cemented it, and great execution by the producers and director and actors made it even better. But I always knew that some of the ideas in the script were going to make people want to write about our country’s relationship with the world, the effects of terrorism on us ten years after 9/11, some of the mental health issues that are in the show and the national security issues. All of those were great press pegs.”

After the Sergeant Brody arc finished, the Homeland writers rebooted the series for each of the following five seasons. Always centered on Carrie, the series moved from the U.S. to Pakistan, then Berlin, back to the U.S., and then to Afghanistan.

“The fundamental premise of the show is a spy thriller, and the fundamental concept is what America’s place is in the world in the 21st century,” added Nevins. “We began the series with this interesting, complicated relationship between Brody and Carrie that took place back in Washington, D.C., and was built around the strange circumstances of his homecoming, but we always knew that ultimately the show was about a CIA operative out in the world. That was the direction of the reboot; let’s put Carrie out in the world in a difficult, fascinating situation and see what the show becomes. [The showrunners] really proved that that’s the fundamental [element] of the show: Carrie in the world at a moment when it’s not easy to be an operative among all the forces that are out there. By doing that, they demonstrated that the show can go in a number of directions. We’ve shown that the show is about a highly trained, complicated woman working as an intelligence operative, not just about the tortured relationship between Carrie and Brody.”

Damian Lewis returned to Showtime in 2016 with the series Billions. We examine that series and talk to Lewis and its other stars in our next post.