Homeland - Season 1

My big TV run continues with season 1 of Homeland on Showtime and here's my take. Slow set up in the first 4 episodes, kick ass episodes 5 through 11 and big old bag of disappointing in the finale that was full of anticlimactic moments, too much given away in the preview where you knew certain people were still going to be not dead and lots and lots and lots of season 2 set up.

I almost bailed after episode 4 as it was dragging but then episode 5 was amazing and completely hooked me. The basic pretense is about an American Marine POW Nicholas Brody played by Damian Lewis is freed from Al-Qaeda after 8 years in captivity and he may or may not be turned. CIA agent Carrie Mathison played by Claire Danes works for her boss Saul Berenson played by Mandy Patinkin to stop the impending terrorist threat. The whole rest of the cast was really good but Body's wife Jessica played by Morena Baccarin was pretty until she chopped off her hair and great. As one might imagine the plot is fairly complicated and in the awesome episodes 5-11 there are tons of twists and they show did a great job of making you guess who was good and who was bad. They did a great job with the dynamics, Brody was captured for 8 years and his wife had formed a romantic relationship with his best friend after I think 6 years so there's a lot of stuff going on there. I don't want to spoil too much but at one point Claire Danes has to act her way through a couple sex scenes and they were gross. I'm not sure if she was trying to look like a nasty huge nosed frog like transsexual in her scenes but if so, job well done. Overall she did both a good and bad job acting in the series, I thought she was terrible for a long time with poor line deliveries, constant disgusting looks, a weird arm swinging pant suit wearing walk, the gross sex scenes but then there were some episodes where her bi polar got out of control and I thought she was great. So when she's trying to act crazy she's fantastic, when she's not it comes off as visually unappealing and high school drama clubish.

I'm waiting on final judgement until after the beginning of next season but would have loved it if they hadn't jacked up the finale so bad. We'll see, hopefully the set up to season 2 is worth it.