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Critic Reviews
The IndependentFeb 18, 2020
Season 8 Review:
It’s well built. But all its life comes from Danes. Mathison’s troubled mind has always been a metaphor for government intelligence: brilliant but unreliable, vital but dangerous. Danes’ performance animates not only the scenes but the ones she is not in, too, and every time she’s out of shot you crave her return.
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Feb 10, 2020
Season 8 Review:
When she slips into operative mode with the ease of a worn-in suit have an extra level of tension to them: the world, dangerous as it is, is not what it was any more than she is the same woman she once was. ... She can also be cold and cruel and create stupendous debacles out of her bad decision-making. In that way, however, she's also the personification of what makes the series worth seeing to its end after nine long years, that the personal frames of mind from which a few people operate can end up determining whether million of people will live in peace or suffer under years of conflict.
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Feb 7, 2020
Season 8 Review:
Danes and Patinkin are obviously tremendous at what they do here, but neither is being asked to do anything new or different or exciting. ... My favorite part of the new season, honestly, might have been reflecting on how, after this lengthy Homeland journey, the character who has gravitated up the call sheet by virtue of sheer survival has been Maury Sterling's Max, now given a meaty subplot.
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Feb 6, 2020
Season 8 Review:
Homeland is about a lot of things, personal and geopolitical. But at its most powerful, the new season conjures that simple, sad feeling: My God, it’s been so long. All of this — the war, the fear, the vengeance. ... The first four episodes of the season have their wild plot lurches but also the gimlet eye for human nature of “Homeland” at its best. Danes gives us a Carrie who’s older and wiser but also wrenchingly aware of her own precariousness. And the show is conscious of the collateral damage of the great game.
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Feb 3, 2020
Season 8 Review:
As the beginning of the end, Season 8 of Homeland naturally doesn't hit the highs that made it a flash cultural phenomenon for a couple of years. But these early episodes are comparable to most of the show's run as a strong espionage serial with a relevant political context and intimate character drama.
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Feb 9, 2018
Season 7 Review:
Fans will be happy that this involves the resurfacing of Carrie’s spycraft, and it’s a pleasure in the season premiere to watch her pulling her gear out of hiding, or duck into a hotel room and put on a disguise--it’s like she’s getting back into her own skin. On the downside, it also means that she’s back to willfully endangering the people in her life, a trait that could be seen as a complexity of character but has always registered as an unpleasant distraction.
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Feb 8, 2018
Season 7 Review:
The Homeland premiere captures the uncertain, unsteady mood of the nation, without any especially perceptive pieces of headline-ripping. ... Despite some outsized acting and the large implications of Keane's actions, on a narrative level the Homeland premiere is decidedly small.
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Feb 7, 2018
Season 7 Review:
As the light of democracy dims, Carrie has become more manic (understandable), and Saul more resolute. The world has turned upside down, and only they can set it right. We know they’ll eventually save the presidency, hopefully the president, too. We know real news will eventually prevail over O’Keefe’s incendiary fake variety. We know all this, but we also suspect the ride would be a lot more fun if Peter was along for it.
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Jan 29, 2018
Season 7 Review:
The season 7 devolves into melodramatics (an assassination!) where real drama used to simmer. [2/9 Feb 2018, p.90]
Jan 13, 2017
Season 6 Review:
The overwhelming sense of a work drained of vitality-- of a series once rich in suspense of the most brilliantly imagined kind, especially in the past two seasons, now flattened, on the evidence of the first episodes, to a deadly predictability, all of it the inevitable result of works dedicated to sermonizing.
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Jan 13, 2017
Season 6 Review:
Homeland might have learned how to turn its history into an asset, but it also can’t escape the fact that, like most shows with long runs, it can do little to surprise us anymore. Danes keeps Carrie watchable through the sheer force of her charisma, and Patinkin is always a treat.
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IndieWireJan 9, 2017
Season 6 Review:
It’s in these studious details that Homeland gains its veteran edge. By Season 6, we know these characters quite well. The extreme situations surrounding them force development and drama, but the writers know to craft seemingly innocuous dialogue that cuts deep or casually incorporate key details that come back in a big way.
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Jan 3, 2017
Oct 5, 2015
Season 5 Review:
Viewers will have to decide how much good faith the show earned with its redemptive fourth season as its fifth one crawls in the direction of a plot. If this is the season in which Homeland aims to resolve its own contradictions and to deliver to its tortured characters some measure of understanding or peace, it would benefit, as my colleague Willa Paskin has noted, from a little bit more crazy.
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Oct 2, 2015
Season 5 Review:
Like the excellent fourth season of Homeland, season five suggests a politically wise and deeply skeptical update of John le Carré's very best spy-centric work, seeing the fury, confusion, and accepted hypocrisy of international diplomacy with the same clarity as the lies and duplicitous acts the show's characters indulge in on a regular basis.
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Oct 2, 2015
Season 5 Review:
Those three central performances [Carrie (Claire Danes), Saul (Mandy Patinkin), and Quinn (Rupert Friend)], along with that of F. Murray Abraham as the C.I.A. sensei Dar Adal, still carry the show, though it’s starting to feel as if we’ve seen everything Ms. Danes has to offer as Carrie.
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Oct 2, 2015
Season 5 Review:
Syria and refugees are only the beginning of this season’s potent mix of ripped-from-the-headlines crises.... Carrie is, unsurprisingly, headed back to her old identity as master snoop on the hunt. Between that and the news focus, not to mention the glittering Berlin street scenes, welcome to the new Homeland.
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Oct 1, 2015
Season 5 Review:
With its masterfully prescient knack for melding international headlines with implausible tales of espionage, Homeland kicks off with parallel plots involving the Islamic State and a computer-hacking incident.... Carrie’s boss is demanding a high-security humanitarian visit to an ISIS trouble spot, and a viewer realizes that this updated Homeland runs the same as it always has.
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Oct 1, 2015
Season 5 Review:
If you're still on board with wondering if Carrie will go off her meds again, whether she and Saul will patch things up, or if Quinn is an alienated killing machine or kind of crushing on Carrie, welcome back to Homeland. But if you're craving something more, Season 5 may feel like a retread job on tires that are showing their wear.
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Sep 28, 2015
Season 5 Review:
Homeland works at a slower pace and the premiere mostly lets Carrie keep up the illusion that she'll be able to live a carefree life with strudel and a smile.... It's that third episode, in which Carrie realizes that past misdeeds are coming home to roost, that the shape of the season really takes effective form.
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TV Guide MagazineSep 24, 2015
Season 5 Review:
This sometimes-erratic thrill ride is back in top form in its fifth season, plunging Carrie into a hornet's nest of topical intrigue, involving Syrian refugee camps and a leaked CIA data breech that imperils US relations with Germany. [28 Sep - 11 Oct 2015, p.17]
Sep 24, 2015
Season 5 Review:
The Edward Snowden-inspired plot is the most compelling story line this season, which is packed with conspiratorial intrigue and complicated questions about political and journalistic ethics.... But the second that Carrie yields to her first fit of mania in years, pasting newspaper clippings all over her house and searching for connections between them--surely, there are computer programs now that allow people to do this without ruining their wallpaper!--it’s d.j. vu all over again.
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Oct 6, 2014
Season 4 Review:
We're getting the character we knew she was capable of being, with the added layer of new motherhood.... Admittedly, it's too early to declare definitively that Homeland is back, but I will say it's back to being a show I'm looking forward to watching, rather than one that made me angry as it lost its credibility mostly and lost its way completely.
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Uncle BarkyOct 3, 2014
Season 4 Review:
Its downward slide shows signs of leveling off by the end of Sunday’s opening two hours. Danes’ Carrie is steelier than ever, her heart hardened to near-concrete while going about the exhilarating business of eliminating terrorists no matter what the collateral damage.
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Oct 3, 2014
Season 4 Review:
[The show’s writers revert] at least once to a Carrie who maunders on pathetically during a trip back to America, as she evokes loving memories of the psychopathic Brody for her infant daughter—a truly unbearable scene, fortunately brief. There’s not a lot likely to dim the attractions of this Homeland with its energized spirit--not to mention the implacable Carrie, capable of mounting a war on terror all her own.
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TV Guide MagazineOct 3, 2014
Season 4 Review:
As Carrie ruthlessly, recklessly pursues answers to how they got into this mess, at peace only when she's at war, Homeland regains much of its dramatic power by taking us far from home and making us wonder that if someone like Carrie is our best hope, should we just abandon hope?
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Oct 3, 2014
Season 4 Review:
The first three hours of the new season that Showtime made available for review suggest Homeland is up for new challenges that move the show somewhat closer in tone to “24” while still maintaining a prestige sheen that it’s smarter, less formulaic and more believable than the Fox terrorism drama.
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Oct 2, 2014
Season 4 Review:
There is a flatness to the supporting characters--Saul's wife and Carrie's sister are now garden-variety Prestige Cable nags--and a measured predictability to the overall story that drains too much tension from even the sight of a wig-free Corey Stoll. Yet Mandy Patinkin and F. Murray Abraham are still fantastic, the show still employs top-notch directors and Homeland can still rustle up an atmosphere of tense isolation when it needs to. All in all, many of the tin-eared elements would more or less tolerable if I were still intrigued by Carrie Mathison.
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Oct 1, 2014
Sep 27, 2013
Season 3 Review:
There's a lot to like in these first two episodes: Dana and Jessica's scenes have greater psychological weight than before, thanks to Brody's absent presence, though they do raise the uncomfortable question of how interested we need to be now that the family isn't directly connected to the show's central institution anymore (the Betty Draper problem on Mad Men). The episodes also give us a clear, at times unnerving sense of how hard it must be for somebody as gifted but volatile as Carrie to work in such a button-down environment, and how easy it must be to write her off as merely unstable or merely crazy.
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Sep 27, 2013
Season 3 Review:
The first two episodes of season 3 are reassuringly grounded in believable intrigue. [7 Oct 2013, p.49]
Sep 27, 2013
Season 3 Review:
At moments, it’s like [Season 3 of] Homeland blew up not just CIA headquarters but season 2 itself. That is, it’s a version of what it might have been like if--as was apparently the original plan--Brody’s explosive vest did go off in that government shelter at the end of season 1. And it works, mostly, at least for the two hours of the season’s beginning.
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Sep 25, 2013
Season 3 Review:
Bringing [Saul and Carrie] to the forefront and giving them a lot of scenes in the first two episodes has strengthened the series. The writing and acting in the first two episodes are exceptional. Let’s hope this continues, because it’s once again thrilling to watch this show.
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Sep 25, 2013Sep 24, 2013
Season 3 Review:
Showing us the long-term impact of the attack on the lives of these characters, whose deep-seated motivations and fears have gradually been revealed to us over the last two seasons, allows Homeland to transcend its tendencies toward the hyperbolic and gives us a reason to suspend our disbelief.
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Sep 19, 2013Oct 4, 2012
Season 2 Review:
The show hasn't lost its clever agility at building pressure-cooker suspense and then lobbing in a surprise. [8 Oct 2012, p.55]
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