For this season, we wanted to consider how America had reacted to 9/11 and how would we react to the next 9/11. Would we have learned anything? We wanted to create an event that was akin to 9/11, but not a mass-casualty attack. So we went back to Afghanistan, where we would have license to tell a more explosive story, for lack of a better word.

“Homeland” was highly praised, but also highly criticized. Did criticism of the show ever affect the story?

Oh, the criticism affected it enormously. First and foremost, I think both the praise and the criticism were overblown. We were taking shots from the left for being Islamophobic and shots from the right for being soft on terrorism. At the beginning of Season 5, Peter Quinn is sitting in a C.I.A. briefing room and telling people what it looks like on the ground in Syria. Our intention in that scene was to portray Quinn as somebody who had seen too much battle and whose judgment was impaired. And yet Fox News and the right wing ran with what Quinn said as: “My God, ‘Homeland’ is getting it right! You have to take a harder line with all these factions in Syria.” That’s inevitable.

There was a moment toward the end of Season 5 where we all just looked at ourselves in the mirror. We were telling a story about an impending attack in Berlin, and four days before we shot the scene, the Paris attacks happened. We found ourselves on the set saying, “What are we doing?” It was truly a “come to Jesus” or “come to Allah” moment: What is the value of telling these stories in a world that felt like it had gone a little crazy? That definitely affected “Homeland” in Seasons 6, 7 and 8.

What changed?

We made a vow to ourselves that we were not going to dramatize any threats in “Homeland” that didn’t actually exist. From our consultants in D.C., we learned that there were no organized Al Qaeda or Islamic State terrorist cells in the U.S. There were lone wolves acting on their own, but no terror cells here. This was when both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were making it seem like we were going to face another 9/11 attack, and it was only a matter of time. So we were very careful in these remaining seasons that we were not going to be sensational. We were trying to not make it worse.