“Homeland,” a series always conscious of current events, tries for some enforced topicality in its sixth season, which begins on Sunday on Showtime. Moving out of the fall for the first time, the show has a story line pegged to its new winter slot and to the recent election: The season is set during a presidential transition, with a president-elect whose relationship to intelligence agencies is dicey.

Not even the most prescient of shows can see the future perfectly, though. The fictional incipient president is a woman (played by Elizabeth Marvel), and her politics appear to be dovish: She floats the idea of the United States’ pulling all its troops out of the Middle East.

Those details put quite a distance between “Homeland” and the reality of the real president-elect, Donald J. Trump. But it’s not gender or foreign-policy views that make the show feel out of tune with the times. It’s the courtesy the characters exhibit as they argue and negotiate, their automatic respect for the traditional processes of government. Life, at the moment, is scarier than fiction, and compared with the wholesale disintegration of civility taking place in Washington, “Homeland” looks quaint. It’s as if it were happening in another century.

And that’s not a bad thing. There’s something comforting about the normalcy of plot and counterplot, action and intrigue. Those have always been the series’s strong points, not ideas, and it may be easier to focus on them without worrying about how closely the story is mimicking events.