Homeland

[Paul Kemp]

Worth watching?

Not unless you're looking to watch 24 with even more melodrama and outlandish plots, as well as a protagonist that sets female main characters back 20 years.

[Paul Kemp]

Worth watching?

Not unless you're looking to watch 24 with even more melodrama and outlandish plots, as well as a protagonist that sets female main characters back 20 years.

Please explain this one...

They've undercut what should be a strong, compelling original female character by making her an irrational crazy person that will do anything, no matter how far out of this world, and lets her emotions get the best of her just to be with the man that she needs otherwise she's left in a mess of worthlessness and cannot do her job correctly. Of course, this is may be one of the lesser problems of the show - the main one being just being badly written. The last season was like trying to be le Carre for third graders.

The show would have been much better without the lame romance angle (I mean...among replacing the most of the creative staff and putting it on a channel that doesn't suck creativity out of shows like Showtime does). Once it was clear that was the direction they were going with it, I lost interest. Still watched the second season though, and a few episodes of the third - just to catch how bad and laughable it got.

[Paul Kemp]

She's a brilliant analyst who happens to be bipolar - not crazy

What exactly has she done that has been "brilliant"? The gist of the show always seems to be 'take a look at this crazy woman who keeps mucking up the works!" She's only "brilliant" because they're telling you that she is.

Homeland won a PRISM award in 2013 for its portrayal of mental health issues.

...which means? Have you taken a look at their past winners and nominees? Not exactly a bastion of quality - in fact, they seem to just honor about any program that mentions a particular issues and not exactly how it is handled.

Who hasn't let their emotions get the better of them. Oh and the romance angle is now gone.

Right, but the problem was moreso that it was incredible uninteresting and poorly written. When they weren't spending time on that angle, they were trying to spin one-note juvenile spy stories.

Homeland is fine, I guess, if you want to view it through a similar lens as shows like 24 (it's most frequent comparison) - which can be entertaining - but it's certainly not the landmark, prestige drama that some want to make it out to be. In fact, it would probably be a better show if they just went full on in a pulp direction and stopped trying hard to be "great" (a problem that House of Cards,  another Atlas favorite, has as well - the US version at least, haven't seen the original).