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In a 2004 episode of “Arrested Development” — a dysfunctional family sitcom and one of TV’s best satirical responses to the war in Iraq — Gob Bluth (Will Arnett) tells his brother Michael (Jason Bateman) that he’s found a contract their real-estate developer father signed to build houses for Saddam Hussein. “I’ve got the thingy!” he says, excitedly. “Half in English, half in squibbly!”

I thought about this scene after hearing the news that a group of graffiti artists had punked the makers of Showtime’s “Homeland,” who had hired them to paint a Berlin set meant to depict a camp of Syrian refugees, with graffiti in Arabic. They did the job, and how; as they revealed online, they tagged the set, which appeared in Sunday’s episode, with messages including “ ‘Homeland’ is racist” and “ ‘Homeland’ is a joke.”

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The track record of Showtime’s drama, now in its fifth season, is, like its geopolitical subject, complicated. But this incident is pretty straightforward and embarrassing. The artists wrote a critique of “Homeland”’s treatment of Arab and Muslim characters into the show itself, in a language used by many of its characters. Yet all anybody in charge of bringing the episode to air was able to see was squibbly.

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I don’t want to paint the series with too broad a brush (or in this case, spray it with too big a can). It’s an entertainment, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes smart, sometimes both at once. It has — like other terrorism thrillers, including “24” — spun outlandish stories about fearsome, villainous, largely Islamic terrorists. At the same time, it has tried to complicate its story beyond us-vs.-them, focusing on the politics and paranoia within the national security state; a major theme in Season 4, set in Pakistan, was the potential of American drone strikes to radicalize the civilian population.

But as the graffiti stunt proves, the little details, the way a culture is presented on screen, can be as important, and damaging, as the big political picture. “Homeland” often uses scenes in which crowded streets in the Middle East and the Islamic world (in addition to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the show has also ventured to Iraq, Lebanon and Iran) stand for a kind of alien, unintelligible chaos, a teeming welter of noise and dust and veils in which danger can lurk anywhere. This problem was crystallized by the promotional poster for Season 4, in which protagonist Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) was depicted as a white face in a sea of dark burqas.

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Arguably, this kind of small detail is the greater problem with “Homeland” and other American dramas set in the region: the tendency to use the signifiers of a culture — clothes, music, street urchins, unfamiliar writing — as a kind of spicy Orientalist soup of otherness. Even in a well-intended drama, if you approach another culture as set decoration, in which the alien appearance matters more than the content, you risk sending a subtle but strong message: this is a terrifying, unknowable land where everything goes squibbly.

Let’s grant that shooting and furnishing a set is hurried work that doesn’t allow endless time for checking details. (Even the graffiti artists said in their post that the production was “frantic.”) That there were no eyes on set or in postproduction able to catch a criticism painted out for them should at least alert the makers of “Homeland” to their potential blind spots.

In a statement after the incident, Alex Gansa, the showrunner, gave credit to his show’s hackers: “We can’t help but admire this act of artistic sabotage.” Admiration is nice; even better would be if the makers of “Homeland,” and other shows like it, could read the writing on the wall.