The story line for the 2011 series Homeland is that USMC sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) has returned following 8 years as a prisoner of war in some Al-Qaeda hellhole. Quasi-rogue CIA agent Carry Mathison (Claire Danes) has a tip that Al-Qaeda has turned a POW into a sleeper agent, and is convinced that Brody is the one. Brody is acting strange -- is this a reaction to imprisonment or something worse -- but Mathison can't find any evidence against him, despite using a variety of illegal or barely-legal evidence gathering techniques.
Sounds like an interesting idea, and the first season was praised by critics.
Recently I watched a good chunk of Homeland's first season. Based on the reviews, I was looking forward to something like Syriana, Smiley's People or the older but quite wonderful spy/betrayal drama Blade on the Feather.
If the concept of the subverted prisoner of war returning as a hero sounds familiar, it's because it was done quite credibly in the The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Homeland lifts some features and even some dialog, from the earlier film, including a well-connected and conniving woman with political ambitions for the returned hero, and a statement from another prisoner of war that Nicholas Brody was his best friend. (In MC, the returned POW hero is praised by fellow POWs as "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.").
Although Homeland is set in the present, it adopts what in my view are anachronistic roles for men and woman, which to me is it's greatest failing. The principal female roles in the six or seven episodes I watched were all portrayed in a negative way. Claire Danes, as Carry Mathison, was required to portray a person with a mental illness who was trying to conceal it from her CIA employers so as to keep her job. An interesting twist -- but would this have been tolerated in a male character?
Another theme running through the series is that the female CIA agents use their vaginas (literally) as tools to gain information (or something) from various CIA targets. One CIA operative (Lynne) is portrayed as having to prostitute herself to an Arab monarch, and then must interview potential recruits (themselves in a state of near-nakedness -- you know that was essential for the storyline) to the monarch's pool of kept women. And our introduction to the series consists of Brody's wife, played by Morena Baccarin, getting vigorously rogered, a pattern repeated by this character in later episodes. Even the main character, Carrie Mathison, uses sex to advance her investigation. (BTW, those who like their screen characters to be loud, appreciative and Anglo-Saxon during sex will find Homeland to be the sort of thing they like.)
Duplicity and manipulation are portrayed as the means of advancement within the CIA. For example, the Gandalf-like Saul Berenson magically procures a search warrant (needed to cover various illegalities committed by Carrie Mathison) by blackmailing a federal judge. Not having worked for the CIA, I have no idea whether this is accurate, but my guess is that the incompetent CYA careerists and poseurs of Burn After Reading would be more typical of our "intelligence community". (What a euphemism!)
Muslims were portrayed negatively throughout the parts of the series that I watched. We had a variety of stereotypes, including the terrorist-supporting, yacht-owning, and sexually perverse sheikh, the mysterious terrorist mastermind, and the dweebish engineering student, who dabbles in terrorism, but seeks cover in marriage to an American, then purchases a home (with laundered money) ... right underneath an airport runway. [ominous chord!] And conversion to Islam is shown as a potential sign of treason.
Ultimately Homeland fails because terrorism is simply not as frightening as worldwide communism once was, and no amount of exclamations by Carrie Mathison ("I'm trying to make sure we don't get hit again") can raise the audience's fears to a level equivalent to the level of the early 1960s, when the first Manchurian Candidate was produced.