Asking the Wrong Questions

This time last year, it seemed like Homeland and Dexter couldn't have more different trajectories.  Dexter was coming off a plodding, padded sixth season that had devolved into the butt of a sad joke, full of nonsensical plot twists, increasingly boring subplots involving the show's perennially underserved secondary characters, and an growing sense that no one involved with the show knew what to do with its central character.  Homeland , on the other hand, had just concluded a triumphant, impossibly assured first season that not only established its two lead characters, bipolar CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and POW-turned-terrorist Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), as complex, nuanced avatars of mingled heroism and villainy, but delivered a fast-paced, pulse-pounding story about terror and anti-terror that nevertheless managed to remain rooted in mundane reality rather than flying off into 24 -style action-adventure fantasy.  And yet, going into their second...

It's late December, which for the last few years has been the time for my annual Dexter write-up.  That's not going to happen this year or, I suspect, any year in the future.  If you've watched the last season of Dexter , you know why.  If you haven't, do yourself a favor and avoid it.  Watch Homeland instead!  One of the biggest problems plaguing Dexter 's sixth season was that it aired on the same channel, and back to back, with what is by now widely acknowledged as the best new show of the fall, if not all of 2011.  The contrast between the two shows only served to highlight the fact that Dexter is over, and Homeland is where it's at. The basic premise--CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) believes that rescued American POW Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) has been turned by his captors and is part of a planned attack on US soil--is fairly well known, but Homeland is nevertheless hard to talk about as a piece of storytelling because it takes its ...

As fall draws into winter, the new TV pilots grow less frequent and more prestigious.  By which I mean more expensive and featuring more high concepts, but not, as the following write-ups demonstrate, necessarily better. In fact, it's been a lackluster fall.  2 Broke Girls and Pan Am have disappointed me.  Ringer and Revenge haven't, but my expectations from them were never very high.  There's only one new show this fall that is genuinely good (see below), and though that's hardly a tragedy--my TV dance card is too full already--it's depressing that this is the best the medium can come up with. Homeland - For various reasons, I ended up banking the first three episodes of Homeland until my holiday last week, and then real-life events caught up with me in a way that made watching the show without preconceptions and emotional baggage utterly impossible.  Homeland is based on an Israeli series, Chatufim ( Prisoners of War ), which addressed the national t...