Claire Danes proves that a bipolar CIA agent heroine is just what the spy drama needs, while Trevor Eve knows it all – again
Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison: 'Even by her own reckoning she has a problem with "mood disorder".' Photograph: Showtime
Homeland 4OD
Kidnap and Ransom ITV1
Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture BBC2
A great idea only seems obvious after the fact, once someone has had originality to think it up in the first place. By the end of the dependency-forming first episode of Homeland, even Upstairs Downstairs fans could see that a psychotic heroine was exactly what spy thrillers have been crying out for, if only someone had realised.
Scriptwriters the world over must have been shaking their heads with the defeated recognition of tinderbox makers who have just seen their first matchstick. It's one thing to place a character in the isolation of unique knowledge – that's an old Hitchcock trick, opening the way for all manner of paranoia-testing trials. But how much smarter to burden that character with psychotic tendencies, so that we can't be sure that what she thinks she's seeing is actually what's happening, and therefore we can't be sure of anything.
That's the intriguing predicament in which Claire Danes's Carrie Mathison places the viewer. She's a CIA agent who, as a colleague notes, "is a little intense" and, even by her own reckoning, has a problem with a "mood disorder", but who in fact is bipolar and may be in the grip of a manic episode.
She believes she's uncovered a plot to turn an American soldier into an al-Qaida operative, and when a marine sergeant, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), is suddenly found eight years after he went missing-presumed-dead in Iraq, Mathison is convinced she's found her plant. It's a testament to Lewis's persuasive skills as an actor that we wonder whether he's an uptight national hero or cunning jihadist spy without for a moment considering his real identity as an old-Etonian British thespian (the show also features the equally British David Harewood as an equally American CIA chief).
Not since the first series of 24, when Jack Bauer was still loosely tethered to a real world, has a show exploded straight out of the starting blocks and moved with such transfixing speed and confidence. Each scene developed the plot with maximum efficiency and minimum exposition, letting us know where the story was but not where it was going.
Some of the people behind Homeland worked on 24, and this series might be viewed as a liberal apology for Bauer's earlier excesses in his one-man war on terror. In essence, 24 dramatised the ticking-bomb defence of torture which maintains that, when an attack is imminent, it's no time to curl up with a text book on human-rights law.
Homeland has neither 24's second-counting urgency, nor its moral clarity. If Bauer was the embodiment of a battered but single-minded post-9/11 America, then Mathison is the unhinged manifestation of where that kind of outlook can lead. The image of her sitting alone in her flat, watching the surveillance footage from an illegally installed camera in Brody's bedroom, poignantly captured the harm that spying does to the spy, as well as to the spied-upon. Certainty, it suggests, begets madness – or maybe it's the other way round.
Mathison is a much more interesting creation than Bauer, the reluctant sadist with a martyrdom complex. Where Bauer maintained a whispering, even priestly dedication to his cause, Mathison can't control her sexuality – when she's not picking up strangers in bars, she's offering sexual favours to her boss to save her career.
It's Brody, the suspected al-Qaida mole, who has more in common with Bauer. They're both familiar with physical suffering. They're both humble, a little repressed, and awkward in the public role of hero. And both seem sexually diminished or thwarted – in his bedroom reunion with his unfaithful wife, after his lost years in confinement, Brody demonstrated all the amorous subtlety of a rapist. And Mathison, the righteous voyeur, was watching every violent thrust. Afraid to miss anything, she is a slave to her overactive mind.
The scene in which she worked out that Brody's nervous hand movements were some form of surreptitious code reminded you of television's potential as a medium of sound and image.
As a jazz band played in a bar and TV screens showed Brody's historic return, Mathison's drunken gaze frenetically switched from one to the other, and it was unclear whether she was experiencing a breakdown or a breakthrough. On last week's evidence, that novel and finely balanced tension is unlikely to decrease in the coming 11 weeks.
The comparison between American and British television dramas has been the subject of a hoary debate in recent years. We've all heard it – and some of us have written it – countless times and, if nothing else, it proves that TV executives are not in the business of being swayed by a massed choir of criticism.
At the risk of futile repetition, then, let's consider Kidnap and Ransom, the second series of the latest vehicle in which Trevor Eve gets to play out his God fantasies. It's often said that British TV lacks money, but if so, then congratulations must go to the film-makers (executive producer: Trevor Eve), because this three-parter is every bit as handsomely shot as Homeland.
Both dramas began in the dusty developing world – in this case in Kashmir, where Dominic King (Eve), hostage negotiator par excellence, became embroiled in a siege on a tourist bus. In nearly all other respects, the two dramas could not have been more different. Where Homeland makes the implausible irresistible, Kidnap and Ransom does almost the opposite – it renders the possible unbelievable.
That isn't necessarily as bad as it sounds, because in spite of various sillinesses in characterisation and plotting, the situation remained compelling. And in any case, the main purpose of the drama was surely not to fire our imagination but to flatter Eve's ego. King knows more than anyone else, not just in the hostage trade, you feel, but in human history. More even than Eve's Peter Boyd in Waking the Dead. Yes, that much. And that, really, is all there is to it.
Except, just as Homeland might be read as an allegory of America's conflicted psyche, so can Kidnap and Ransom be seen as a certain kind of view of what Britain's role ought to be in the world. What kind of view? That cynical, effortlessly superior and yet perversely pragmatic one that's familiar from Graham Greene novels and realpolitik radicals. It's the perspective that relishes rewarding kidnappers, for example, the better to underline one's impotence with regard to all things foreign. King, in this understanding, becomes a stalwart symbol of non-intervention, a man of such acute conscience that he can't be moved to make anything so crass as a moral judgment.
Or, hang about, perhaps it was just a story about a hostage negotiator.
Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture didn't hang about. One second he was discussing John Singer Sargent, society portraiture, Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes, the next he was on to miners, choirs and brass bands, then Kipling, HG Wells, TS Eliot, ballroom dancing, the 47 cinemas that used to be in Bolton, and the creation of the welfare state.
Somewhere in that rapid succession of names and events was a thesis about the relationship between class and culture. I'm not sure exactly what it was, and I'm not sure Bragg was either, but it didn't seem to matter because there were plenty of ideas and observations to grab the attention.
Pat Barker mentioned that officers were on average five inches taller than the ranks in the first world war, while Ferdinand Mount noted that it was often intellectuals from the left who displayed the greatest revulsion towards the working class. Enjoyable stuff, which proved, once again, that while we may no longer produce classy dramas, we can always make a drama of class.
