TYRANT: SOUTH FORK MOVES TO SYRIA

I was on Front Row a couple of weeks back, discussing Tyrant with Kirsty Lang (you can listen to the programme here for another year!). Kirsty's first question was what did I think about Tyrant, and my response was that it was 'all over the place'. And so it is.

The credits say it was 'created' by Gideon Raff, who did the Israeli series that became Homeland in the US. But I suspect Raff came up with the pitch. Homeland took an American, turned him into a Moslem, and then brought him back to America to do the bidding of his terrorist mentor in Islam. Tyrant works the other way around: take a Moslem, in this case the younger son of the ruler of 'Abbudin', turn him into an American, and then bring him home and have him stay to help his brother rule the country when their father dies.

If you consider the concept far-fetched, don't forget that Bashar al-Assad was studying opthamology in England when he was called home after the death of his older brother Basil. But even as you remember that, you need to accept that the concept is far fetched and the execution is fetched to infinity. Because the show seems to have been developed by Howard Gordon (24, Homeland) and Craig Wright (Six Feet Under, Lost, Dirty Sexy Money) and it seems trying desperately to incorporate as much of all those shows as possible. So what you get is a family soap opera but in an opulent fantasy setting, Dallas with revolution in the air, Dynasty without blow-dried hair.

The family saga owes a lot to the Godfather. Bassam Al-Fayeed is the younger brother who wanted out of the family business. He has traumatic reasons buried in his past, and he's trying desperately to hold them in. Which Adam Rayner, a British actor playing this Arab-American, does by holding everything in. He makes doe eyes to show he's struggling within, he makes sad eyes to show he doesn't like what he has to do. If he's Michael Corleone, older brother Jamaal is Sonny Corleone out of Caligula. Ashraf Barhum is a kind of Arab Mark Strong, and the role lets him let everything out, including rape, pillage, and killing. To make it more interesting, his wife Leila (Moran Atias), the Alexis Carrington of this show, all plotting and accessorizing, has 'history' with Bassam, which will eventually, one supposes interfere with Bassam/Barry's American wife. Although Molly is also supposed to be a doctor, Jennifer Finnegan plays the part with the wide-eyed surprise of a guest on Oprah discovering things in her life are not the way they seem.

I also found it curious that Bassam would be called Barry, since America has only one 'Barry' who's also (allegedly) a Moslem in thrall to powers from the world of Islam, and that of course is President Barack 'Barry' Obama. I note only that the show airs on Fox's FX network, for whose audience the default position is fear of the different, unknown, and Islamic, and leave it to you to decide how coincidental that all is.

In case you believe my Dallas anology might be forced, wait for the moment Barry's English-born mother, played by Alice Krieg comes on stage in full Miss Ellie mode. 'Oh Bassam, I know your brother is a sadistic unstable homicidal rapist and abuser of his people, but if he's late for the barbeque at the palace Friday I'll never forgive him!'.

And then there are the kids. This is the part of the show that bears Gordon's heavy touch, as both 24 and Homeland seemed to relish their subplot of obnoxious troubled daughters who exist mostly to create desperate situations for their fathers. You need to remember that the 18-35 market of TV watchers is assumed not only to have zero interest in anyone or anything older than they are, but zero intelligence to comprehend the same. So give them kids to identify with. In Tyrant, the daughter is actually the reasonable one, but Barry's son Sammy is both obnoxious and gay, both of which are dangerous things to be in this kingdom. I really don't want to hang around and see the way that pans out.

It is a shame they killed off the father in the first episode, as the conflict between the brothers could have been milked more effective with his presence, and because Nasser Farris as Khaled is very good; he's a subtle actor, which suits the nature of his character here. There is one major problem, however. Khaled has always favoured older son Jamaal, but after the 'twist' which ends the first episode, you would have thought that he would have recognised something different in his sons. Instead, Bassam becomes Barry. He's lucky he didn't move to Britain, or he would have become Bazza.

Meanwhile there is an actual revolution fomenting, and Barry is tasked with trying to be the reasonable American with good intentions who can just get everyone to be nice to each other, while preserving the status quo. Sounds very familiar? The most interesting character, potentially, is the CIA agent John Tucker (Justin Kirk), who somewhere along the line ought to be shown to be less straightforward and good-intentioned that he was in the first two shows. Or he'll never get a spot as a Fox Contributor on Megan Kelly or Sean Hannity's shows.

Shot in bright light, with little depth or shadow, Tyrant reflects its presentation, but since I did the Front Row segment, FX has commissioned a second series of the 'political' drama, as they call it. It's one of those shows you might feel compelled to watch, just to see what outrage Jamaal will perpetrate, or what horrible plot twists will drive Adam Rayner to have to emote, but it's the Middle East as soap. All that's missing is the Abbudin Oil Barons Club.

THE AFGHAN WAR FILM: THE FILM PROGRAMME DISCUSSION

I was on BBC Radio 4's Film Programme today (we taped it yesterday). It's available on I player (link to it here), and will also be repeated on Sunday at 11pm; it's the first item on the show. Francine Stock and I had a fascinating conversation, both on and off air, which was cut down considerably for the slot; what remains is largely the wider view, which makes sense following the Peter Berg interview about Lone Survivor.

Doing the research for the interview, I realised there are quite a few Afghan war films I not only had not seen, but which had barely made an impression on me. We didn't record a conversation of why these films have made less impact than a number about Iraq, but I may review some here at IT along the way. We did discuss the two versions of Brothers, Susanne Bier's Danish one starring Ulrich Thomsen, and the American remake, directed by the Irishman Jim Sheridan, with Toby Maguire and Jake Gyllenhall. I pointed out that the Danish experience in the Middle East has had significant play in their TV series shown here, not only Borgen but some of the crime series as well, and more significantly that I am convinced Brothers is the source material, or inspiration, for Homeland.

Homeland was also a connecting point for me, to examine how wars that are unpopular, or at least not being fought by the country as a whole (the Bush wars are now 11 years old, and still make little impact on the home front--people scream 'support the troops' and keep their children home to watch American Idol) produce films that tend to concentrate on the effect of the war on us. In our discussion I had declared Three Kings the best of the movies set in these specific wars, but it had the advantage of that war's being over, and the ambiguity of our withdrawal as its political core. Most of the early, successful, films about Vietnam were about the home front, not just The Deer Hunter (which I still consider hollow) but Coming Home, Tracks, Rolling Thunder, and Who'll Stop The Rain (aka Dog Soldiers). Taxi Driver is part of that bunch too. Of course there were allegorical critiques, like MASH, Catch 22, or Soldier Blue.

The best of the recent  homefront movies is probably In The Valley Of Elah, where Tommy Lee Jones hardens director Paul Haggis' more liberal instincts. But you heard Francine mention Lions For Lambs, which we actually discussed in the tapings--I called it a remake of Starship Troopers which dares to question Ayn Rand.

We used to be less triumphalist. The British think their war films are more realistic and more understated, but they aren't. Look at the World War II combat films produced during the war, and how many of them involve loss and last stands. They Were Expendable, Air Force, Bataan, Corregidor, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, are the films of a nation who like to feel themselves the underdogs.

We also mentioned 9th Company, Fyodor Bondarchuk's movie set in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which I'm going to see soon and write about, and we didn't get to talk enough about the specific documentaries.

And though when they called I assumed it was to ask me to talk about  Jersey Boys, as I've written The Pocket Essential Clint Eastwood and I am old enough to have bought Four Seasons' 45s, I did at least get to talk to Francine about Clint's next film, American Sniper, which, like Lone Survivor, is based on Navy Seals, in this case the memoir of a Seal sniper. It's interesting that Clint played an assassin in Where Eagles Dare, a very Sergio Leone character in Kelly's Heroes, but when it came to war movies he's made only three: the very triumphal, very cliched, and basically Green Berets update (with victory at the end) Heartbreak Ridge, and then the much more sombre Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, both very much about the kinds of issues which Peter Berg described, the horrible toll taken on men at war. So I'm looking forward to seeing what sort of take Clint brings to that one.

MANHUNT: LONDON FILM FESTIVAL'S WAR ON TERROR II

Manhunt might be billed as the counterpoint, or indeed antidote, to Zero Dark Thirty or Homeland, in the scripts and iconography of which a single (in both senses of the word) beautiful American woman, obsessed with her task, either because she's the best or bipolar or both, tries to defeat a 21^st Century Fu Manchu, head of a monstrous third-world army about to swallow up America and its 'freedom they hate'.

Made for HBO by Greg Barker, based on Peter Bergen's book, and featuring Bergen among its interviewees, Manhunt tells the story of the decade-long search for Osama bin Laden in different terms, a manhunt against a small gang of criminals, spearheaded by 'the Sisterhood', a team of women analysts more like soccer moms than secret agents. From that premise, the film examines h the contrast between the reality of that hunt, which culminated in the killing of Bin Laden in his compound in Pakistan, and the perception foisted upon the public. It also addresses cogently the entire structure of the so-called 'war on terror', its uses and abuses of torture, and its relations to what might be seen as that war's ultimate aims.

It's a balanced picture, filled with interviews that lay out the moral dilemmas and the practical problems. The most interesting at first are with the members of 'the sisterhood', whose tracking of Al Queda began in the 1990s, and became obsessive, and whose warnings about his plans were largely ignored. In the wake of 9/11, however, with Bin Laden elevated to the levels of a Hitler as worldwide public enemy number 1, their work became more and more important, though they often found themselves in conflict with the agents on the ground. Nada Bakos and Cynthia Storer, tasked with following and tracking Al Queda from afar, are given more depth when set against the agents on the ground, here represented by Marty Martin, who worked the Middle East, and Jose Rodriquez, who ran counter-terrorism at the CIA.

Storer talks about how the women were called 'obsessive', as if that were a female characteristic, before the whole CIA became obsessive. And Bakos, assigned to find Musab al Kawaki, who was finally killed in an airstrike in 2006, explains in plainest terms 'my job was to hunt a person down, to capture or kill. I had to be okay with that.' It was Bakos who provided the key link to the courier, whose tracking finally located Bin Laden.

The contrasts are worthy of an episode of Homeland, though more chilling for their reality. A smug reference to 'black sites' as 'boutique locations' where suspects can be tortured by American proxies, is a chilling reminder of what the reality of intelligence work is like. But the former deputy director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, introduced performing sleight of hand tricks, is unconvincing when he speaks about the CIA feeling 'alone' with their responsibility to prevent another 9/11. When considered in the wake of what that excuse has been used to justify, from domestic surveillance to political repression, he sounds chilling. One of the Sisterhood, Jennifer Matthews, was actually killed in the suicide bombing at Khost, bringing home the reality, and the frustration.

What becomes most clear is how false the Zero Dark Thirty portrayal, and argument, is, and how much domestic politics impeded an early elimination of Bin Laden, during the Clinton years. Zero Dark Thirty's celebration of torture is scoffed at most effectively by Ali Soufan, an agent and interrogator, who points out the intel that finally got Bin Laden came through research by the Sisterhood and more traditional interrogation techniques. It demonstrates how Barker's documentary not only raises questions, but presents them in depth and context, something sorely lacking in most mainstream media. In this context, the absence of reference to the Bush administration, and the early connections between Bin Laden and the US, seems odd, and when President Obama is portrayed announcing Bin Laden's death, he is almost literally seen as a hologram figure, a PR construct worthy of Orwell. Barker includes an interview with General Stanley McChrystal, whose criticisms of the adminstration when he was in command in Afghanistan, which makes the most crucial point, when he says, 'I'm not sure America has made the effort to understand what it is we just went through...the key is why are the enemy the enemy? If you don't understand why they're doing it, it's very difficult to stop it.'

In the larger sense that question it seems to get lost in the rush to action. Philip Mudd, former deputy chief of counter-terrorism sees things more simply: 'There are philosophical debates you can have, but at the end of the day, the question is: Are you gonna move or not? Yes or no? Go or no go? That's it.' If you've watched Zero Dark Thirty, or network news, you know the answer to that one already.

THE GOLDEN GLOBES, IN GLOBS

The important thing to remember about the Golden Globe awards is that they serve their purpose, but that purpose (or purposes) have nothing much to do with predicting Oscars or judging quality. The awards are voted on by about 90 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and their biggest purpose is to do what that organisation set them up to do: ingratiate themselves with the Hollywood studios, get better access to them, and to their stars. Their members, of whom I've known a couple, are not usually film critics but primarily writers chasing celebrity interviews and entertainment previews, indeed some are general reporters. Their jobs depend largely on studio public relations access, and if you look closely at the banquet, you'll see the members are scattered among the tables, giving each a built in chance for a couple of exclusives on the night. Something the movie-makers like, because being of small number, and desperate, the Globes voters are eminently, shall we say, vulnerable to inducement. And the awards serve a useful purpose to Hollywood: both as a way to hype up films pre-Oscar, and also to generate some ticket sales for films that won't triumph at Oscar time. This is made easier because the Globes give separate awards for 'drama' and 'musical or comedy,' twice the winners mean fewer losers! Given given the extra shot at the odds, the Globes more often than not fail to predict the Academy Awards' best picture. And television loves the Globes too, for the rub they get with the movie people—you could argue that the worldwide market for television programmes and their stars makes this even more essential than the film awards. Then there's that European obsession with golden-this and golden-that awards; I once served on a jury for a Sports TV award called the 'Golden Shot'. If Oscar had lived in Cannes, rather than its twinned city Beverly Hills, he'd be called The Golden Oscars.

Keeping all this in mind, it was funny to read some of the British critics opining that Argo's award for best drama came because the picture shows 'Tinseltown coming to the rescue of the real world', as if the Globe voters were actually part of Tinseltown. I suppose you could argue that, in a Stockholm Syndrome sense, they are. As a piece of historical drama, Argo may well be more accurate than Zero Dark Thirty, or indeed Lincoln (neither of which I have seen as I write this) and it is both suspenseful and entertaining, as well as catching its period very well. But you can pretty much write it off for an Oscar. Director Ben Affleck wasn't even nominated for an Oscar, and neither was Tom Hooper, who directed Les Miserables, which won the best musical award.

Besides Argo, it was a good night for the CIA, who also took the best actress awards in both drama and TV, though they weren't nominated for the Zero Dark Thirty script. Jessica Chastain's role, which is supposedly a composite character, seems oddly similar to Clare Danes' Carrie, serving primarily to nag her organisation into following up on her work. I've written about Homeland elsewhere on this blog, but it does occur to me that in its insistence on Carrie's neurotic behaviour, the show has it both ways, presenting a strong female character who's driven crazy trying to succeed. It may be that the point is it's a man's world, and its corruptions would drive anyone insane, but that interpretation is also tempered by her love for Brody, which renders her all marshmallowy in the end. It is also reflected in other women characters: Aileen Morgan, (Marin Ireland) the American woman working for Al-Queda, who kills herself rather than spend her life as a tortured prisoner in a mainland Guantanemo, or the Vice President's wife, who knows how the game is played, as an adjunct of the males. The most telling character, however, is the British journalism student cum Al Queda operative Roya Hammad (played by Zuleikha Robinson) who, after she is captured, has to listen to Carrie telling her all the great things she has to look forward to in life without Al Queda—and then spits out her defiance and her disgust at Carrie's lack of understanding what her 'enemy' is all about. It was as powerful as Morgan's suicide—and presumably wouldn't be needed in Zero Dark Thirty.

Among the actors it was a good day for the British Lewis brothers. Daniel Day-Lewis won for Lincoln, and Damien Lewis for playing Brody in Homeland. I can't comment yet on ' Lincoln, but I wonder if comparing Day-Lewis' career to Spencer Tracy's might be apt (for example, Northwest Passage vs Last Of The Mohicans). Damien Lewis seems to specialise in playing American characters who are trying to draw on inner reserves in the face of being asked to do things they might have found impossible not long before. In Homeland, particularly in the second series, his visible breakdown was almost a parallel to Danes' in the first series; theirs may be the relationship most ripe for psychoanalysis since McMurtry met the Chief.

In the wake of this non-consequence it probably wasn't surprising that the scene get stolen by a couple of sidebars, which made the biggest and the funniest splashes in the chativerse. The biggest, of course, was Jodie Foster's acceptance speech on being given the Cecil B DeMille award. CB, were he alive today, would be rolling over in his grave. Foster's rambling 'j'accuse' appeared to be blaming the press in general for making her not come out when she was out, or maybe the opposite, and perhaps using the stage to complain about the attention she's received. Not for nothing did her dress appear to be made of chain mail. It's hard to escape the idea that Jodie might have been saying she'd like back the lifetime for which she was being given her award. In fifteen years, I fully expect Claire Danes to be making the same speech.

The more amusing moment for the Globes actually came the next day, in a New York Times blog written by Alessandra Stanley, whose take on the awards was headlined 'A Salute To Girl Power' and boasted the following lede:

At a time when President Obama is under attack for appointing so many white men — and so few women — to senior positions in the White House, Hollywood seemed intent Sunday on correcting the imbalance at the Golden Globes. 

Apart from the wave of nausea, if I understand this correctly, 'Hollywood', in the person of 90 foreign journalists who work there, tried to correct an 'imbalance' in the American government by hiring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to host their show. Leave aside the idea that the President was somehow obligated to replace Hilary Clinton was another woman, or that he actually tried to and had the idea shot down from all sides; this vacuity is remarkable on a couple of lesser levels. First off, the idea that hiring Tina Fey, who after all was the best Republican candidate in the 2008 elections and is one of the funnist people out there, needs to be explained as some sort of market correction is insane. It should be taken for granted and pass without notice that Tina Fey should be hosting. But even more stunning is the assumption that her hosting the inanity of a second-tier self-congratulatory award show somehow would rebalance the perceived faults of the United States government. 'Oh, no woman is secretary of state, but that's OK because TWO women hosted the Golden Globes!'. The logical next step would be to demand that Obama nominate either Jessica Chastain or Claire Danes to become head of the CIA!

BRODY LED THREE SO-CALLED LIVES? HOMELAND SERIES TWO

The second series of Homeland begins with Carrie on her meds and teaching EFL, while Saul is cruisiaround Beirut dressed as Meyer Lansky, and might as well be wearing a sign saying 'shoot me, I'm the CIA station chief here and I'm Jewish'. But having disposed of Carrie, the CIA then send her back to Beirut, which in Homeland terms is basically a teeming street market bordered by crumbling houses and populated by shifty-looking people who automatically follow strangers and threaten them. Sort of like Brooklyn.

Meanwhile Brody, everybody's favourite Marine sergeant turned Congressman is now a viable Vice-Presidential candidate; in fact more viable than Paul Ryan, while moonlighting as an Islamic terrorist. It's a shame he appears to be a Republican, because he'd fit right into the Obama White House with that profile. He's picked up a new handler, an English-accented woman (Roya Hammad, played by Zuleika Robinson, left) who's somehow got White House press credentials for her grad student blog, because we have to make it easy for Al-Queda, and because no one's yet figured out that Damian Lewis, despite having served in the 101^st Airborne during WWII, is British. But then so is the guy playing Carrie's careerist nemesis at the CIA, David Estes (played by David Harewood).

By a quirk of picking up the right cloth shoulder bag on her way out of her Beirut contact's apartment, Carrie unwittingly delivers to Saul a copy of Brody's suicide-bomb confession—which of course has never been used, but the Al-Queda types like to carry around with them when they head to the teeming markets to do their shopping. Saul manages to sneak it out of Beirut, by hiding a copy which the Lebanese version of Homeland Securtity confiscate, and now we now that the psychologically disturbed Carrie was right, David was wrong, and Brody is now a problem.

In fact, Lewis' adjustment to American life has an extreme flaw, which is when he gets into casual dress. He seems to prefer a kangol and polo shirt (this is a marine sergeant, not a suburban golf pro, remember) two sizes too small early on. But then, in episode three, despite his having to make an important political speech with the VP (played by Jamey Sheridan as if he's Michael Murphy), Roya sends him to drive the Al Queda bombmaker who's a tailor in Gettysburg to a safe house. The illogic of this boggles the mind, especially since in other ways Al-Queda are supposed to be all-powerful, with assets everywhere in America. But it gets even worse when Brody arrives in Getttysburg walking stiffly through town in a casual outfit of baseball cap, windbreaker, and slacks that appears to again be too small for him, as well as brand-new, starched and ironed. And he walks with a prissy kind of stiffness which would make him stand out in any small town, unless it were the set for a remake of Invaders From Mars. I thought maybe this was somehow a sort of character comment, a cunning reference to Fifties paranoia, or to his inability to adjust to civilian life as a spy, but I suspect the reality is that either Brody is more comfortable in uniform, whether Marine or politician, where he can be as stiff as he likes, or Lewis is more comfortable in British casual wear.

Then, as he tries to change a flat tire without a jack, and chase his passenger through the woods in a rainstorm, which winds up in his having to kill him with the patented TV neck-breaker while he talks to his wife who's wondering why he's not at the speech. Watching Lewis trying to balance these elements of his it occurred to me what I was seeing was a 21^st century version of I Led Three Lives, the Fifties TV show which starred Richard (no relation) Carlson as Herbert Philbrick, 'citizen, communist, counter-spy'. I recalled mentioning the show as one of a number of examples when I wrote about Homeland's first series last year (link here). But now the parallel was more direct, although in this case, Brody has only two lives, I thought with some disappointment.

That disappointment lasted only as far as episode four, in which Carrie hands Brody the ulitmate hotel bar pick-up rejection: just as he's about to embrace/strange Carrie agents burst into the room, and this CIA version of the Murphy game sees him led away with a black hood over his head, headed to Gitmo or some safe house torture chamber.

So the stage is set for Brody to be turned—whether by persuasion or by the sort of combination of therapy and drugs that has been so ineffective with Carrie—into a real Herbert Philbrick. He's the war hero who's been turned by Al-Queda who can now operate as a double-agent, thereby doubling the risk, and, as Philbrick discovered, making even the simplest daily tasks fraught with suspicion, deception, and of course danger. The possibility is then open for the CIA, knowing that Carrie is a head case and has already been involved with Brody, assigning her to be his handler, which will add an element of the 'will they-won't they' dilemma so beloved of American television morality, and it leaves the continuous question, which was never a problem for the audience following Richard Carlson, of whether or not Brody's latest conversion is real.

Complicating the issue will be Brody's Marine ex-buddies, the most demented of whom is convinced (correctly) Brodie played a part in the murder of his fellow convert to Islam, the sniper Walker, and a burgeoning sub-plot of romance between Brody's daughter and the son of the Vice-President, which raises the worry that the need to keep a teenaged audience interested by showing them versions of themselves, which so plagued 24 that it quickly became unwatchable, could well take over the show. I can see Abu Nazir sending the Teen Terrorists to the US and infiltrating them into Sidwell Friends School.

I Led Three Lives was a paradigm of the Red Scare during the death-throes of the McCarthy Era. Homeland is threatening to become exactly the same thing—with the hugely exaggerated threat of the enemy within being overcome by the increasingly harried misunderstood hero. Lewis does a great imitation of Richard Carlson worried he won't be able to find a pay phone in time to let the FBI know where and when the cell meeting is where the latest secrets are about to be passed on to Moscow. Beneath the flash of the plot, the twist of Brody's being a successful politician and a legitimate Moslem/terrorist (which thus far in Homeland appear to be the same thing) and of course the distinct pleasure we take in watching Clare Danes go all psycho every week, Homeland is, at heart, an old paradigm come home to roost, I Led Three So-Called Lives, under the guise of My So-Called War On Terror.

MY SO-CALLED WAR: HOMELAND, GOOD WIFE, BRING THE MIDEAST HOME

A few nights ago, suffering an odd coincidence of jetlag, worry, and Channel 4 On Demand, I watched episodes of two TV series back to back. The first came from the third season of The Good Wife, Alicia's law firm brings suit against the government for torturing an American Moslem doctor whom they have accused of being a terrorist. The second was the first episode of Homeland, in which a Marine held and tortured for eight years by Al Qaeda, is rescued and returns home, where CIA agent Clare Danes suspects he has been turned.

It was like watching conflicting decades from my past battling it out for the control of small screen reality. The Fifties against, I'm not sure: the Sixties perhaps, or the Eighties. Depending on how you interpret The Good Wife.

I said the Sixties because,at times, Good Wife seems to be trying to be The Defenders for a new century (and I do not mean the Jim Belushi series, but the Reginald Rose-created EG Marshall and Robert Reed one back in the early Sixties). That show was filled with the promise of The New Frontier, a certain American liberalism which no one had yet turned into a dirty word (though sponsors still balked at some of the topics. Today they simply fund right-wing think tanks instead). More often, The Good Wife reminds me of LA Law (or indeed, ER, on which Julianna Marguiles made her name back in the days when the features on her face were still capable of movement): its heart is in the right place but with far more interest in glitzy melodrama and an optimism based on Reagan-era fantasy—which I would argue was the prevailing mode in America for two decades. In fact you might even argue that the election of Barack Obama was a last gasp of such a fantasy. Obama himself could be the considered the apotheosis of what I'd call the Sorkin Syndrome: the appearance of a left-wing agenda which when push comes to shove always winds up endorsing the American status quo, our good intentions, and the triumphs of our democracy—usually with the cast of West Wing loosening their ties, rolling up their sleeves, and drinking domestic beer from the bottle. Mitt Romney couldn't do it better.

And in fact, as if to prove my point about the halvah-like crumbling of The Good Wife's intentions, no sooner do they outline the repressive nature behind the democracy Americans have surrendered in the name of 'security', they move to an episode in which a drone operator's killing of civilians targeted by her missile turns out to be an old-fashioned good old honest error, not something endemic to the wars we send our noble soldiers to fight on behalf of powerfully vested interests. And the 'will she-won't she' nature of Alicia's personal life returns to the fray as an inevitable side-effect of the show's most interesting feature: it's matter-of-fact attitude toward Cook County politics, whose corruption never lessens its faith in democracy in action.

Speaking of noble soldiers, Homeland is a reversion to the paranoia of the early 1950s, when the McCarthyite world-view was made into drama (I Led Three Lives, Invasion Of The Body Snatches), and which reached its apotheosis in The Manchurian Candidate, which turned us into the victims of the all-powerful mentalists of North Korea. Funny how things don't change. The key thing about Homeland is that it is a remake of an Israeli series, and the world-view is one in which the powerful are actually the victims. Al Queda, like the North Koreans, are actually all powerful, infiltrating our society, ready to destroy it, or considerable portions thereof, at a moment's notice. If you think my first reaction was overly paranoid, the show itself made this clear in the close of a later episode, when Danes' psychotic CIA agent Carrie (interesting Stephen King/Brian dePalma resonance there) Mathison is visiting her sister's family so she can cop more medication to keep her functioning, explains to her niece how she literally will protect her from the nasty terrorists so she can sleep at night. The message is you have everything to fear, including fear itself (corollary: stay inside and boost our ratings by watching more TV, which will exacerbate your fear, which will...ad infinitum).

There was a reaction to this in the 1970s--sparked by the infamous Russian roulette scenes of The Deer Hunter, which led to the 'veterans betrayed' films, the Rambo franchise, but more tellingly less well-known movies like Rolling Thunder, where the returning vet is not just denied heroism, but actually robbed of it. Homeland, as we will see, plays with those tropes, but the veteran's heroism is never questioned on the outside, just the inside.

Speaking of infiltration, I find it more dangerous that Damien Lewis, a Brit who's already a veteran of DDay and World War II in Band Of Brothers, plays the returning Marine Sgt. Nick Brody, and another Brit, David Harewood (think a less intense Idris Elba with Mr. Spock ears) plays the ambitious deputy director of the CIA. Of course The Good Wife features Archie Panjabi as the sexually ambiguous investigator Kalinda, and Alan Cumming as Eli Gold, whom nobody seems to have noticed is English. This is something HUAC ought to be recalled to investigate, though I can't really complain if Archie's on our screens more as a result.

More interestingly in Homeland, Mandy Patinkin plays the CIA's top Mid-East analyst in a very Jewish way, as if to emphasise the close parallels of world view (though as I write this, there are serious smoke clouds being thrown up around his characters, and I refuse to cheat and look ahead to find out how they resolve. Even more interestingly, Brody's wife is played by Morena Baccarin, a Brazilian-born childhood friend of Danes. America really is the melting pot of opportunity! The returning soldier/wife's afffair with best friend when she thought he was dead subplot is Homeland's attempt at soap opera interest, but it never crackles—except when Brody and Carrie get it on in the back seat of a car—it's like a 50s teenager movie too!

Meanwhile, the domestic front is addressed in the person of a wholesome American woman, radicalised by a childhood in the Mid East with her oil-company employed father, who lures an otherwise assimiliated professor of Arab descent over to the dark side. America is a very dangerous place, even if you ignore the kind of American-on-American violence that is the staple of network TV. And (digression here) speaking of violence, how about the violence perpetrated against the audience when a network television 'hour' is a programme of barely 40 minutes long.

But in the end, the focus is on Danes, and she does disturbed as well as any actress around. Her ability to externalise internal torment is a masterpiece of control. Carrie's psychosis is a specific reaction to the 911 attacks—she feels she should have stopped them, and saved America, she feels compelled to try to stop the next round. It has, literally, driven her crazy, and driven her into a permanent state of battle against the shadowy enemy that, it is never suggested, may be exaggerated by her own disease. The assumption is that America, like Carrie, is walking a tightrope from which they could topple at any time. Perhaps Showtime should have called it 'My So-Called War'.