Secret pregnancies! Mysterious murders! Spoiled children screaming about how they hate their parents! A lot of messy crying! No, I’m not talking about the final season of Dynasty, but the last season of Homeland – the gritty political thriller that won an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in 2012 and then drove over a cliff, not realising it was plummeting until everyone walked away from the fiery wreckage.



Homeland returns for its fourth season in the US on Sunday 5 October at 9pm ET (12 October in the UK) and feels very different, not just from the horrendous second and third seasons, but from the amazing first one. And that’s a good thing.

The show began as a captivating push/pull between two unreliable characters: Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a bipolar CIA agent, and Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a marine who was help captive by terrorists for eight years and may or may not have been compromised. What drove the show was constantly questioning which one of these people was telling the truth. Was Carrie just a crazy lady with conspiracy theories? Was Brody an American hero? Or was he really a converted terrorist and she was right all along?

The decision to keep Brody alive at the end of the first season, when it was revealed that he was a sleeper agent all along, did the show in. Creator and writer Alex Gansa wanted to keep Carrie and Brody together as a romantic couple, when that was never in the story’s best interest. Homeland was at its strongest when they were diametrically opposed. It thrived on the force of trying to push these two magnets together even as they propelled each other apart.

Next thing we know the show is no longer about the dangers of living in the post-9/11 world and the human impact of the war on terror – it’s just another nighttime soap opera. When Brody killed the vice-president using some doohickey that messes with his pacemaker so that a terrorist would free Carrie, it felt like an episode from Scandal.

The fourth season of Homeland looks to correct that by giving the show what seems to be almost a complete reboot. When the season starts, Carrie is in Kabul, we see her walking through the streets to the familiar jazz soundtrack. Back at the office, where she’s leading drone strikes against the enemy with intel she’s getting from a shadowy agent (Cory Stoll who is just everywhere these days), Carrie pushes her hair out of her face and then giving a fake smile in her perfected manner.

The show is familiar, but different. It is again grounded in a way that it was during its first season and allowing the plot to unspool with Carrie’s investigation rather than at a pace more suitable for 12-minute Adult Swim cartoons or the worse seasons of Glee. So far, after the first three episodes, she has not had one chin-puckering ugly cry. That is a huge improvement!

With the death of Brody at the end of last season, Homeland has no choice but to double down on Carrie, which is great. She’s one of the few female anti-heroes in TV’s ever-exalted golden age of drama so it’s nice to at least have a modicum of gender parity for a change.

Carrie is also a fascinating study. She is a reluctant mother and a terrible employee, but always smart enough to be capable. And there are some other great characters joining the roster. Ayaan (Suraj Sharma) is a Pakistani medical student who gets unwillingly involved in politics when his family is killed in a drone strike. Martha Boyd (Laila Robins) is the tough American ambassador in Pakistan who is both Carrie’s foil and opponent. It’s a toss-up over who owns more pantsuits.

The most interesting transformation for season four is Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) Carrie’s former partner who usually did nothing but grunt, shoot people, and shout “Carrie we have to go … NOW!” This year he gets a much more involved storyline about what life is like after suffering a trauma.

There are plenty of great shots in the first several episodes of Homeland – none more haunting than watching a house be blown up by drones on a monitor as silent explosions light up the night – but what really makes this whole new Homeland interesting is that it’s about consequences. What happens now that Carrie’s a mother? What happens now that the Americans blew up a wedding party to get a terrorist? What happens when Quinn kills more people in the line of duty? What happens now that Saul (Mandy Patinkin) is forced to join the private sector?

Yes, Brody is gone (actually, thank God Brody is gone) but Homeland is once again about the aftermath of terrible things while a war still rages. It is full of people striving to make good decisions to atone for all their bad ones. After seasons two and three of this show, it’s something the writers should know about intimately.