New season preview: Homeland, The Leftovers

By Hank Stuever

Washington Post·

4 Oct, 2015 04:00 PM5 mins to read

Carrie Mathison (played by Claire Danes) shifts to the private sector in Homeland. Photo / Stephan Rabold

Two SoHo favourites have switched to new locations for their latest seasons

Even the sleekest shows require constant maintenance under the hood. Sometimes the work that needs to be done in the break between seasons is as easy as refilling a depleted story arc, replacing the filter on a subplot or adjusting for the loss of characters, while other shows require a trip back to the dealer for heavier work - equivalent to replacing the transmission.

Showtime's Homeland and HBO's The Leftovers - both showing on Sky's SoHo channel in New Zealand - are very different premium cable dramas, but both return after some obvious tinkering and a hefty bill for parts and labour. But both still are prone to cough and sputter.

Even though it routinely appears on viewers' lists of favorite shows, Homeland always went a bit haywire during the last lap of each of its four previous seasons, which, if nothing else, can be blamed on the fact that it is, in the end, a show about a woman with a mental illness.

After a demoralising series of defeats in Pakistan, Homeland's troubled heroine, CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), spent a couple of episodes in epilogue mode, trying to salvage her life. The result was a season-ender that ambiguously dangled rather than tantalised.

The fix used by Homeland for this season is the one most frequently used by other shows - especially espionage thrillers - a flash forward.

Homeland show-runner Alex Gansa has moved the story ahead two years and shifted it to Berlin.

Carrie, who keeps her bipolar disorder in check with medications, is about as content as we could hope to see her - a peace that can't possibly last. She's in the private sector now, working as the head of security for a nebulously philanthropic corporation.

The job is meant to afford Carrie the work-life balance she never knew. Now she can pick up her toddler, Frannie (yes, Carrie decided to raise her last link to the late Nicholas Brody), after preschool and enjoy quiet nights at home with a suitably mellow partner, Jonas (Alexander Fehling).

But this isn't a show about getting cosy. With its masterfully prescient knack for melding international headlines with implausible tales of espionage, Homeland kicks off with parallel plots involving Islamic State and a computer-hacking incident in which thousands of the CIA's most valuable documents are downloaded from its German office into the servers of a pornstreaming operation.

No sooner has the CIA hack been detected than we are back in the world of Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), who travels to Berlin to handle the crisis, which returns him to Carrie's orbit.

And poor, haunted-eyed Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) is still out there, assigned to some of the CIA's darkest and most off-the-book missions. For now, that means it's up to him to keep Homeland on point.

Meanwhile, Carrie's boss is demanding a high-security humanitarian visit to an Islamic State trouble spot, and a viewer realises this updated Homeland runs the same as it always has.

But Carrie's life is preferable to those of that bunch of sourpusses collectively known as The Leftovers, the 98 per cent of the world's population who did not mysteriously vanish in a rapture-like event on October 14, 2011.

The Leftovers

ended its first, difficult season with embattled small-town police chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) and his lover Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) discovering a baby girl on their doorstep (left there by Kevin's son, who joined then escaped a religious cult). They have also been joined by Kevin's teenage daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley), in an unconventional family of four, assembled from tragedy, but ready to cope. That could have served as the full stop at the end of a sad and convoluted sentence, acknowledging a failed experiment.

HBO, however, is not prone to give up so easily. The Leftovers spent season one establishing itself as a psychological exploration of the corrosive effects of spiritual hollowness.

That's still the theme in season two, but The Leftovers has gone in for heavy maintenance: The story shifts forward several months and now takes place in a Texas town called Jarden, where, for reasons unknown, not a single person departed.

Now nicknamed Miracle, Jarden has become a mecca for all kinds, many of whom hope that the aura of the place (and maybe the water?) will protect them from another Sudden Departure.

Kevin and Nora decide to move there. But forget all that, because the first episode of season two actually opens with a long scene of a cavewoman giving birth during an earthquake. She soon meets with a disaster with biblical echoes.

It certainly gets points for being completely unexpected, but frankly it comes much too soon after the heavy statement mess left by the second season of True Detective.

The Leftovers seems unable to be dissuaded from its initial mistake - to attempt to turn Tom Perrotta's wry, allegorical 9/11-era novel into something at once bizarre and profound. Despite the maintenance, the show is still stuck in low gear.