Alex Gansa walks us through Homeland’s first season (Part 1 of 4)
Showtime’s Homeland came out of nowhere to have one of the best first seasons for a TV series in recent memory. The twisty thriller looked at first blush like a typical season of 24, centered as it was on a CIA agent who suspected a U.S. Marine who’d been held in captivity by terrorists for eight years had been turned and was actively working against the United States. But the story earned its many plot twists by keeping an almost ruthless focus on character, from tortured CIA agent Carrie Mathison to conflicted P.O.W. returned home Nicholas Brody, from Carrie’s soft-spoken mentor Saul Berenson to Brody’s earthy, sensual wife, Jessica, who strayed while he was gone. The series hails from two 24 producers—Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa—who previously worked together as a writing team, in particular on the first two seasons of The X-Files. Gansa recently sat down with The A.V. Club to talk about the course of the series’ first 12 episodes.
This section covers episodes one through three, beginning with the pilot and concluding with “Clean Skin.”
“Pilot” (Oct. 2, 2011)
Troubled CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) reacts with horror when Marine Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) is rescued in Afghanistan, because one of her Middle East sources told her that a U.S. Marine had been turned in captivity.
The A.V. Club: Here’s the obvious question: How much of what was going to happen going forward did you know when you did the pilot?
Alex Gansa: Well, when we first started writing the pilot, and actually read the Israeli series [Prisoners Of War, the rough template for Homeland —ed.], we had no idea where we were going to go. You know how these things work when you’re trying to sell a series: You’re completely and utterly focused on trying to produce 60-odd pages of work that is going to set up characters, tell a great story, and convince people that you actually have a series idea here, so that was our primary focus. Once we could finish the pilot and got some good response on it, that’s when we began to sit down and really start discussing where a first or second season might go.
AVC: What had you decided at this point, especially about Brody’s true allegiances?
AG: Well there was a lot of argument at the beginning between Howard and me, frankly, about—first of all, whether you could be ambiguous about Brody’s allegiance at all, whether you had to know from the very beginning whether he had been turned in captivity or not. We had a lot of discussion about, if you decided not to reveal his allegiance at that point and keep the question open, how long can you sustain that over a series? So that kind of became the real big point of argument between us at the beginning of the show. As we discussed and talked our way through that, it became clear that at a certain point—midway, three-quarters of the way, a quarter of the way—through the season, we would have to come down one way or another. That’s how we made the compromise. My feeling was that you could keep the ambiguity going for a lot longer. Howard, schooled in 24 and in a very black-and-white universe, felt that we had to reveal in the pilot that he had been turned in captivity. And so, the compromise really came that we were going to keep it going as long as we felt it was feasible dramatically, and then reveal in a series of turns and twists where he stood exactly.
AVC: You also keep quite a few secrets about Carrie. She’s much more clear to us than Brody, but at the same time, we don’t entirely know the nature of her mental illness. How did you decide what to keep mysterious about her?
AG: She was a work in progress as well. When the series was originally conceived, although we always wanted to take it to paid cable, we had some masters to serve first. So we did write the thing on spec. [In television terms, a pilot written on spec is a script written without a guaranteed sale. —ed.] It was always done on spec for 20th Century Fox television. So, we had to shop it around to the networks first, and especially we had to shop it around to Fox first.
We knew that if we did it for a network, there was no way we’d be able to have two ambiguous protagonists. There’s no way we’d be able to have an unreliable Carrie Mathison, and there’s very little chance that we would have been able to have a gray Nick Brody. So, in the first incarnation of this, Carrie was more or less a straight-ahead intelligence officer. It was only when Fox decided that a serialized show was not what they wanted to do, and we were able to take it to Showtime, that’s when we started to get a lot more interesting with the characters. Carrie’s mental instability, her condition, her illness, however you want to put it, that’s when we really started to discuss and explore that part of her character. We did always know that at some point in the season she was going to suffer a manic breakdown. It’s funny because every episode, we said it. After the pilot, we said, “You know, she should have her manic breakdown in episode two,” but after episode two we said “episode three.” [Laughs.] And we kept putting it off and putting it off because it didn’t feel right. Of course, the more we backed it into the last couple of episodes, the more charged it became.
AVC: What were the primary takeaways from the Israeli series?
AG: [Prisoners Of War] is different tonally. It’s different in terms of the characters, it’s different in terms of the thriller aspect and the psychological-thriller aspect. But we share some similarities. I mean obviously, the returned POWs, the sort of seminal family dynamics. In the Israeli series, two prisoners of war come back, and one is left behind. In ours, obviously only one prisoner of war comes back because we had to make room for a Carrie Mathison character who doesn’t really exist in the Israeli show. The Israeli show is much more of a family drama about the reintegration of the Israeli soldiers back into their lives. There is some question about whether or not they gave up information, but it’s information that was given up 17 years ago, so it doesn’t have the currency and immediacy of a man who comes back who may actually be plotting something against the country of his origin. So, clearly, we owe a lot to the Israeli series, but we really took it in a different direction.
AVC: You and Howard Gordon both worked on 24, which was very restrictive in its structure in a lot of ways. What did you find most freeing about breaking away from that model?
AG: The obvious things. What I mentioned earlier in terms of the reliability of the protagonist, in terms of the guilt or innocence of her quarry—we were able to really let episodes breathe and have a rhythm all their own. We weren’t building to artificial act breaks. We could do nudity and language. All that stuff was incredibly liberating.
With regard to 24 specifically… Look, Howard worked on 24 from the very beginning, and he was very schooled in how to tell a good, cracking thriller and I knew nothing about that when I came on to 24 [in the show’s seventh season]. I learned a lot on that show just in terms of straight plotting, but we were very, very adamant at the beginning of Homeland that Carrie wasn’t going to pick up a gun, and that we were going to tell a much slower-paced psychological story, rather than an action story. That was a big difference. Actually, if you talk to Howard, he’ll tell you. I mean, he really had to be weaned off the formula, and it led to a lot of arguments and disagreements at the beginning about how much of the thriller aspect we had to put into the show.
AVC: What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of cable versus network?
AG: Well, I’ve developed a couple of shows for HBO but none for Showtime, so I’ve had limited experience developing for paid cable, or for cable in general. But it’s hard to think of a positive on the broadcast network side. It is so restrictive, and the various networks have such preconceived ideas about what their kinds of shows are, so you’re constantly feeling like you’re snuggling and squeezing into their box. It does close off your mind a little bit.
Whereas in paid cable, you’re really allowed to spread your wings. They encourage you to push the envelope; they encourage you to think outside of the box. Obviously, as a writer, that’s just the most liberating, great thing. Now, it can lead to complete disaster, I feel. [Laughs.] It’s like they say. In some ways, writing free verse is the hardest thing to do. Writing a sonnet is easy, because it’s got to be iambic pentameter, it’s got to be 16 lines, it’s got to have this rhyming scheme. So, there’s a sense that it’s almost easier to do the network thing, but it’s much more rewarding to do the paid-cable thing if you hit it, if you nail it.
AVC: In the pilot, Saul’s the one guy we’ve seen a lot of times before: the grizzled mentor who helps out the hero. How did you set about making him his own guy?
AG: Saul’s character is a direct descendent of a couple John le Carré characters: George Smiley [of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy] and Gunther Bachmann, if you’ve read A Most Wanted Man. He is very much in the Cold War-era mode: an old-school CIA operative who trained and learned his craft overseas, and married his wife overseas. So, he became our father figure. He became the paternal, grounding moral center of the intelligence universe for us.
Mandy [Patinkin] was always our first choice. I was in college, and I had a girlfriend who was a huge musical theater fan, and she always wanted me to come into New York to go see some show. And I was always, like, “I’m not going to go see any musical theater; I’m not a musical theater guy.” And finally, she said, “Look, I’m breaking up with you if you don’t come to this show.” So I got on the train, and I met her in New York, and we went to go see Mandy and Bernadette Peters in Sunday In The Park With George. It’s all about making art: “Finishing the Hat,” “Move On,” all these songs. And I remember at the end of the first act, I had tears streaming down my face. I was just so moved by the performance, and I turned to this girl who I was with and said, “That is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” and she looked at me and said, “Yeah, that was okay.” [Laughs.]
Anyway, ever since then, Mandy has been on my mind, and I’ve always wanted to work with him. He had such a profound effect on my life at that point. Interestingly enough, he also wore a beard in that show, in Sunday In The Park With George. So, the first thing we did after he read the pilot, I said, “Man, you gotta do me one favor: You gotta grow the beard back.” So he grew the beard back, and I think in a way it makes him more approachable and more appealing, and certainly in this role I think it really helped. There’s something about the beard that softens him.
