By Miriam R. Kramer

“I-I missed something once before, I won’t…. I can’t let that happen again.” — Carrie Mathison, Homeland, Season 1: Pilot, speaking of September 11, 2001.

As political espionage thrillers go, the series Homeland cannot be beaten. It debuted on Showtime in October 2011 only to end in February 2020 after eight seasons. In November it came to Netflix, immediately gaining a fervid new audience.

I recently viewed it again to see if its mixture of the nerve-wracking crosshairs of espionage and national political imperatives stood up, or if the series even represented any of the USA’s deliriously worsening domestic and foreign political landscapes. It prefigures them. All hail Homeland’s writing, directing, and the terrific acting from Clair Danes as CIA agent Carrie Mathison and Mandy Patinkin in CIA and security roles. Their chemistry and energy fuel Homeland’s greatness.

This show pulses to the neurotic, workaholic beat thrumming through foreign policy in Washington, DC’s government institutions. An imbalanced, brilliant CIA agent and improbable heroine, Carrie Mathison works with her equally passionate boss, Saul Berenson. Each will sacrifice almost anything to complete their missions.

Berenson is a CIA higher-up, a man obsessed with his job. He successfully uses his status as an outsider to maintain a clearer view of his surroundings. As a Jew, he grew up in a small, WASP, Indiana town without much religious identity. Carrie and Saul are symbiotic, a team in which each sees the other as family. Neither can easily maintain an outside romantic relationship, and both mostly eschew the idea of children—they are married to the games they play for organizations protecting the United States. They expect much from each other.

In the pilot episode Carrie sneaks into a Middle Eastern prison to bargain for information with a prisoner about to die. He provides her with crucial if nebulous intelligence: an American prisoner has been turned. A few years later, an American prisoner of war, a Marine named Nicholas Brody, is released from prison after eight years being held by an Al-Qaeda commander in Syria.

Three seasons focus on Mathison’s belief that Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) was turned by the enemy, and now poses a significant risk to national security. Since 9/11, Carrie will not let any perceived threat from Al-Qaeda rest until she finds a way to stop it.

I have two small quibbles with the show. When only Carrie can play the hero with a crew of quickly assembled covert ops guys at her command, the viewer must suspend her disbelief. Luckily, the show is so good, and Carrie is so charismatic that it is not too difficult.

Second and more importantly, Carrie is made out to be bipolar 1. Her sister, a doctor, prescribes medication to her so the CIA can’t find out. First off, Carrie would be found out during a polygraph. Also, a prominent psychiatrist I met in Washington, DC told me she had multiple CIA and FBI clients who were bipolar, so the illness is accepted at least to some extent.

This aspect of Carrie’s personality should be valuable in exposing any ignorant viewer to a manageable mental illness. Yet her disease is often shown as a huge weight that makes her impossible to handle or able to function. As she mentally cycles from manic energy to immobilizing depression, her family and employers see her as unpredictable and out of control.

When she deliberately goes untreated in Homeland, her professionally valuable manic phase allows her to draw brilliant conclusions and solve security issues by seeing and understanding webs of people, places, and motives. She purposefully places herself in harm’s way to identify these connections, sacrificing her health and reputation.

Therefore, I would like to know how much we should believe regarding the show’s medical accuracy. Homeland does not present an image of the majority of bipolar patients. They are either type 1, which suffers more severe highs and lows, or type 2, which is similar but much less severe. Both sets of sufferers attempt to manage their illnesses, and most do so well. They do not deserve to be stigmatized.

From season four onwards, the series covers various threats to the United States: terrorism by radical Islam in Germany; the potential for civil war in the United States, egged on by an incendiary Alex Jones–type media host; and plans for a coup from within the government by the military and other government employees, spurred along by potential Russian disinformation. Writers on this show are prescient about the problems ensuing today from domestic threats, such as the polarization that prompts each half of the country to dismiss or argue with the other. The viewer is often peeping through her hands at the screen, and plot twists appear as strategically and suddenly as jacks-in-the-boxes.

Other well-fleshed characters, such as a troubled covert ops soldier named Peter Quinn, a loyal American-Iranian named Farah Sherazi who works for the CIA as a forensic accountant, and the reliable CIA computer programmer, Max Piotrowski, add their viewpoints as facets to the American ideas of homeland: how we define that term and our relationship to it.

Throughout, those defending the United States find themselves in quandaries, ones in which all decisions are unacceptable or terrible. Should you betray an asset to save thousands of people? Is it necessary to delve so deeply into someone’s personality that you don’t know where you begin and they end? In the end, after all the lies you have told and personalities you have adopted, who are you and what do you represent?

The cliché that espionage is only colored in shades of grey exists. Yet Carrie, at least, with Saul supporting her reckless courage, always has a clear-cut sense of her values, whatever shade they might be. She knows what she will or will not do to support her homeland, America, regardless of the impression she leaves.

Please do not miss this show if you care about nerve-jangling thrills, great acting and writing, and your own desire to figure out what a homeland, wherever it might be, and Homeland, mean to you.

About the Author: Miriam Kramer worked at Olsson’s Books & Records before it closed in 2008, welcoming Old Town, Alexandria, residents to a unique place where employees with encyclopedic knowledge of literature and music enriched the community. As a global nomad, she has lived, studied, or worked in diverse countries overseas. With her experience writing and studying international affairs, she has promoted democracy, international media, the arts, peace building, and citizen diplomacy during her career.