Channel Surfing: \'Homeland\' and the Elusive Art of Exposition

September 30, 2012, 11:00 pm

By MIKE HALE

This season, the critics Mike Hale and Neil Genzlinger are checking out favorite shows and seeing how they hold up. Previous entries in this series include posts on “New Girl,” “NCIS” and “Scandal.”

The last time we had seen Carrie Mathison, she was strapped to a hospital table having her brain lightly fried. The first time we saw her Sunday night in the Season 2 premiere of “Homeland,” she was picking - vegetables. A little joke? I thought so, but then I have a morbid sense of humor.

Showtime's Emmy-winning drama, with its two Emmy-winning lead actors - Claire Danes as the bipolar Carrie and Damian Lewis as Carrie's antagonist and former (for now) obsession, Nicholas Brody - jumped right back into high gear. Carrie, who thinks she's done with the C.I.A. - she's now teaching English as a second language when she isn't gardening - is pulled back in when an “asset” she developed years ago in Beirut resurfaces. Brody is now a congressman with vice-presidential aspirations and thinks he can be a gentleman traitor - no more getting his hands dirty. He's pulled back in when the terrorist Abu Nazir contacts him through a journalist and instructs him to break into a safe at the C.I.A.

Carrie and Brody both remain trapped, though the terms have changed - Carrie, having lost everything, could stay away if she chose, but her love of the spy game draws her back; Brody, having gained (in improbable fashion) a fabulous new life, must stick with and compound his lies to protect himself and his family.

As Alessandra Stanley observed in her review of Season 2, now that the tightly wound plot of the first season has run its course, the show will inevita bly tilt toward more straightforward international-thriller territory - something potentially more ordinary.

The speed with which Carrie and Brody are yanked back into a new mystery plot, the huge changes in their lives having been barely touched on, was a sign of this. So was the occasional flat-footed piece of exposition. We didn't need Carrie's sister to tell her and us: “You say this is about patriotism, but we both know that's not the whole story. Part of you wants to do this.” The fierce smile on Carrie's face after she shook a tail in a Beirut market said it much better.

And some of the twists felt a little harder to swallow than events in Season 1 (as long as we ignore the whole midseason plot detour when Carrie and Brody had sex). Would a visitor, even a congressman, be left alone in the office of a deputy director of the C.I.A., and even if he was, would it be that easy to break into the safe? If Brody's daughter blurted out in front of a school ass embly that her congressman father was a Muslim, wouldn't the entire Internet know within 15 minutes?

But it's easy to nitpick when a show has set the bar as high as “Homeland” did in its first season. The performances are still exemplary, not just by the leads but also by Mandy Patinkin as Claire's C.I.A. mentor, David Harewood as the deputy director and Morgan Saylor as Brody's daughter. The combination of adult intelligence and crisp action is still pretty much unmatched on American television - it exposes a show like ABC's “Last Resort” for the video game it is.

Please let us know in the comments how you felt about the return of “Homeland,” and what you think Season 2 holds in store.