My So-Called CIA Officer

This is a terrible promo shot, but Damien Lewis is in it so I give it a pass.

Claire Danes I adore you.  My So-Called Life.* Romeo & Juliet. Stardust. Stage Beauty. Terminator 3 (whatever it’s fantastic and you all have no taste).

Now Claire Danes is starring in a Showtime series, Homeland. Unlike 9 out of 10 Showtime series based around women she will not be insane/dying/super quirky. Instead she’s a badass intelligence officer for the CIA. Damien Lewis (of Life, the best police procedural of the last five years) is a prisoner of war believed to be dead for the last nine years. Now he’s alive and Claire Danes is convinced he’s an Al-Qaeda agent.

And Mandy Patinkin plays some sort of mentor who won’t make it past the second season because damn does Patinkin hate appearing in tv shows over the long-term.

The show is being written and run by Howard Gordon and some other guys who worked on 24. Howard Gordon is an old school producer. He worked on Beauty and the Beast, which your mom probably watched in the late 80s. Then he wrote some of the worst episodes of The X-Files before moving on to sending Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel into the shitter. Why yes, I am wary of Gordon on a project. He has a tendency to take fascinating premises and mire them in mediocrity.

But Claire Danes and Damien Lewis stuck in a mediocre spy drama? Totally fine. They’ll elevate it. I hope.

*I wonder if Danes now hates this show as much as Sally Fields hates the one where she was a flying nun.