In the season finale of the third season of "Homeland," Carrie Mathison, the bipolar CIA agent played by Claire Danes, is appointed as the Istanbul bureau chief to oversee the agency’s covert Iranian operation—the result of a season-long effort to place a double agent in the upper echelons of Iranian intelligence.

Meanwhile, Iran features prominently in the latest corruption scandal in Turkey: an Iranian businessman allegedly bribed the Turkish government and acted as a ringmaster in a gas-for-gold scheme that has brought down four ministers and the head of one of the Turkey's biggest banks.

"Homeland" has never been known for its accuracy in the U.S., but to some Turks, the Showtime series is part of an ongoing international plot against the country by “international groups,” a phrase frequently used by Turkey’s Premier Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A late-night news show on 24, a Turkish news network and a supporter of Erdoğan, discussed the show's season finale in detail a day after the corruption scandal broke on December 17 (which, in turn, came two days after the "Homeland" finale aired in the U.S.). “Homeland in Istanbul,” the chyron on 24 read. “Is Turkey the next target of the American deep state?”

“Weird how American thrillers always get the timing right,” Ardan Zentürk, the network’s nightly news anchor, said that night. While he insisted in an email that his show "used 'Homeland' as color rather than accuse the American deep state,” his guest that night thinks "Homeland" has actual CIA ties. “I’m sure that the writing team partners with CIA, gets information from them, and writes it accordingly,” Murat Tolga Şen, a movie critic on the popular beyazperde.com blog, writes in an e-mail. “The Istanbul appointment of the protagonist is a sign that things will heat up in this region in real life.”

Another TV critic, Tayfun Atay of the Turkish daily Radikal, also believes in what he calls the “logistics exchange,” a flow of ideas between the show’s creators and the CIA: “But it would be stretching to say that there’s a direct and organic tie.” Showtime’s press office did not return e-mails for comment.