Homeland--fucking bah!

See, here's the thing about Homeland: the initial premise was interesting but inherently very limited.  The idea is that an MIA soldier, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), thought long-dead, is found and rescued in Afghanistan, so he's all a big hero and stuff, but there's a CIA agent, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) who grows to suspect that he was Turned during his captivity, and now may be involved in some sort of deep-undercover terrorist-type things--but she's bipolar and generally mentally fragile and who knows whether her suspicions mean anything?  But this was never going to last very long, was it?  Because if it turns out Carrie's just totally delusional, there's not much of a show, is there?  And it's certainly not going to just be a Crying of Lot 49 radical-indeterminacy-type thing, because it's not that arty, and anyway, it wouldn't be feasible over multiple seasons.

It was necessary, therefore, that there indeed be doings afoot, and that Brody (everyone, including his wife, refers to him as "Brody," for some unexplained reason--no one ever calls him Nicholas) be involved in them.  So…now the show is a lot less conceptually interesting.  It's still entertaining as far as it goes, but it's also on very dicey ground.  The show was made by the creators of 24, but it has a reputation for being less dumb and politically toxic than that show was.  Which it is to a degree, but way too many people seem to be deluding themselves into thinking that a show which presupposes the presence of unfathomably cunning, malevolent, and efficacious Middle Eastern terrorists on US soil is not deeply problematic, when it really, really is.  The show doesn't claim in so many words that all Muslims are terrorists--there are at least a few Good Ones about--but let's face it, for all intents and purposes, that is the rhetorical message, and one again, you're only fooling yourself if you try to claim otherwise.

Still, the first season was authentically riveting stuff.  The second season got substantially more silly, but it was still enjoyable to watch.  Then the third season…man, I started watching it, and then I got to episode six, and there's this Iranian agent that the "good guys" are trying to get at, and he's all cool and calculating and stuff, and then at the end of the episode, he brutally murders his ex-wife and daughter-in-law, and it just struck me as so completely fucking nakedly racist that all interest I had in watching any further was just killed dead.  Part of me thinks maybe I'm just hypersensitive, given that nobody else appears even to be particularly nonplussed about this plot point (people note that in general terms that its portrayal of Muslims is highly dubious, but not the particular incident).  But I don't think so.  The idea that this cool-as-ice guy is just going to descend at the drop of a hat into animal savagery--you know what THEY'RE like, really, deep down--is just SO FUCKING APPALLING TO ME that I kind of retroactively hate everything about the show.  Perhaps later episodes put all this into context.  Perhaps I don't give a shit.  Even if I did see a reason to subject myself to this garbage, let's face it, it's on Showtime--ie, the Dexter network.  It's almost certainly only gonna get worse.

Now The Americans, the show about deep-undercover Russian spies in the early eighties--there's something I can get behind.  In some ways like Homeland, but, so far, actually good and not politically horrible.  Let's just hope they don't fuck it up.