9. We Can Feel The Unsettling Forces That Invade Our Relationships
In ways similar to The Americans, Homeland effectively creates drama on the most intimate of levels. The politics of surveillance, covert governmental operations, and the dangers of terrorist operations are magnified and intensified in the personal struggles of the show's many characters. In season 1, Nicholas and Jessica's marriage rests on a knife-edge; throughout the series Saul and his wife Mira experience similar bumps in the road (including Mira's affair in season 3); in season 3, much to the chagrin of many fans of the show, Dana Brody's inability to deal with the stresses of her father's actions and all of the associated bad press leads to more estrangement with her mother; and, in what is the most pivotal of the relationships on the show, Carrie and Brody's feelings for one another vacillate between love and anger, trust and suspicion. While many of these intimate struggles seem at least a bit farfetched, we can nonetheless relate to them in a Shakespearean sense of their being analogues to our own lives.