S THE third seasonof Homeland begins dthis month, those whofollowed the first twowon’t need to be re-minded where they left off. A terroristattack close to the center of action hasnot only dispatchedas many importantcharacters as a Game of Throneswedding but

blown up assumptions about the story we already suspected were too neat; if we’ve learned anything aboutthis show, it’s that Homelanddoesn’t do neat. On the otherhand, TV viewers who haven’t seen TTthe most talked-about series of thelast several years will need to catch up because, more than with any show since Lost, there’s no jumping in midtt -way. I can tell you that an American prisoner of war, played by Damian

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Lewis, was found alive in Iraq after eightyears of being presumed dead and that from the get-go the CIA operative portrayed by Claire Danes concluded (rightly) he was an Al Qaeda Candidate, brainwashed—like Lau-rence Harvey in the 1962 thriller The Man-churian Candidate—and sent back to set inmotion an attack. This gets you two or threehours in. I can add that, as surely happenswith all terrorists and spies, Lewis and Danes have fallen in love in spite of his marriage,her marching orders, and the lovers’ mutualsuspicion of each other, which they fully jus-

tify whenever they aren’t having hot sex. This takes you to about halfway through season one. Finally, without spoiling the rest, I’ll point out that it’s in the nature of such TV dra-mas to grow more preposterous rather than less, and if creators Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, who developed the Showtime project from an Israeli-TV counterpart (which inturn was modeled on the first American post-9/11 hit, 24), aren’t making this up as they goalong, they have even more to answer for.

Homeland was a sensation out of the gate din 2011, gathering acclaim and sweeping up

Emmys, and the reason such shows are sooverrated is because, unlike with other formsof popular art, success in TV is measured al-most purely by how obsessive we become. A series like Homeland is necessarily open-dended since the idea behind television is to spend as much time as possible resolving aslittle as possible, with a story’s usual need forresolution replaced by an unrelenting urgen-cy that always defers answers and constantly postpones closure. If pop music is the me-dium that’s comparably visceral, a song fin-ishes nonetheless, allowing us to assess the entirety of its four-minute trajectory, whereaswhat counts in TV is how long and effectively we can be jerked around. If the premise is intriguing enough and the execution expert enough, whole seasons may pass (three, say)before we begin wondering what it’s all aboutor whether it matters.

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L I F F - H A N G I N G A N D page-turning (or whatever gets you to turn the page) are time-honored storytelling traditions going back at least as far as 19th-century novels if not 16th-century Eliza-bethan productions that began in

the afternoon and ran into the evening. But if Charles Dickens didn’t know all along—over the course of a couple of years and 19installments—that Amy Dorrit was actually an heiress and bound to marry Arthur, he was an even better writer than we realized; and though anything’s possible for a worldgenius, Shakespeare probably didn’t kill off half the major characters in the final scenes of Hamlet because he ran out of ink. A show like Mad Men doesn’t last six seasons just by nstoking our compulsiveness but by offeringan emerging view of evolving American val-ues in the 1960s, and in the course of indulg-ing your Battlestar Galactica mania, you gota haunting meditation on what it means to be human. For some series the artistic stakes,if we can be grand about it, are such thattheir creators are willing to challenge theirviewers’ obsessions, practically daring their audiences to leave: At least twice during its run, as Breaking Bad became less and less compromising in its moral complexity, I won-dered whether I would be able to watch the show anymore. (I was.)

Homeland is nothing if not addictive, asdsomeone with better things to do like the president of the United States can attest. I’ve gotten myself hooked on the series twice now, staying up till one in the morning as Iplowed my way through; but once the binge was over, little about the show stayed with

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me or lured me back. A DVD set in reason-ably good condition might still be found in the used section at Amoeba if you hurry.While the espionage setting lends a conve-nient hall-of-mirrors conceit on which thewriters can fall back, in its second season Homeland jumped enough sharks to start a dnew Jaws franchise (if Dick Cheney’s heart missed a beat watching the scenario regard-ing a vice president’s pacemaker, it probably was more from mirth than alarm); and what used to be the series’ most notable asset,Claire Danes, morphed into its big-gest problem. The premise’s motherof all twists is that between the two lover-adversaries, Lewis’s tortured/brainwashed/suicidal assassin isthe stable one, while Danes’s bipo-lar CIA offi cer is half an eye twitch away from the crazier side of ber-serk; if her eyes pop out of herhead any farther, she’ll become a Tex Avery character. On a weekly basis during season two she did something so spectacularly illconsidered as to fl irt with plain loony, and the fact that it was often for the purpose of liberating an otherwise cornered plotline—as when in Lebanon she jeopardized thelives of her entire company in order to race back into an apartment and retrieve what

turned out to be the telltale memory card that would vindicate her—simply appearsthat much more opportunistic on the part of a narrative that’s already exhausted thepatience of at least one cranky viewer.

Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipu-lative. But in fi ve seasons of the Baltimorecop show The Wire, I don’t remember oncefeeling manipulated because as in any great,geven open-ended, opus the characters took on lives of their own, declaring indepen-

dence from their creators by the sheer force of the conviction that created them, and because therewas a sense of something at stakeand that the manipulation was onbehalf of something more thankeeping an audience coming back. I’m not sure I’ll watch the third sea-son of Homeland. If I do, it’s because

Mandy Patinkin, as Danes’s supervisor, men-tor, and father fi gure , has a kind of integrity that has steadily made him the show’s grav-ity and soul while also seeming like he’s in a whole other show of his own, or should be.Homeland might be well advised to let Lewisdvanish in the wilds of Canada for good, putDanes back on her meds and behind a desk where she can stop annoying us, and allow

Patinkin to take over. When we last saw him in season two’s closing moments, praying aloud amid the rubble of what had just hap-pened, his face a war zone between despair and grace, he had found himself hurled by events from a quasi-renegade status in which his career was on the verge of implo-sion to an abrupt, violence-wrought posi-tion of leadership that was unfathomable30 minutes before. But then everything that happens in Homeland is unfathomable 30dminutes before. In Homeland’s desperation ddto keep ginning up the topsy-turvy, evenmoney says Patinkin winds up being Osama bin Laden’s revenge-crazed half-brother for whom everything that’s happened is part of a plan. Let me know three years from now what happens. Or don’t.

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MANIC DEPRESSION Claire Danes plays a CIA operative with bipolar disorder, and Damian Lewis is an ex-POW and suspected terrorist in

the Showtime series Homeland

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