Ms. Danes won a fistful of Emmy, Golden Globe, and SAG awards that would cover a mantlepiece. Carrie's initial lust for Brody turns into deep love by the end of Season 2. Well, they are the two stars of the show.
The producers craft dramatic, drop dead, page-turning endings for the episodes and generate massive interest into what's next. Homeland, started in 2011, carried 12 episodes for 8 seasons. It's almost a relic of how a miniseries was put together. Lots of episodes in a season.
My telephone bill tops $200. That's a lot you might think just to be able to call for pizza. And that's just the landline. There is a family cell phone bill that I have a number for, but is handled financially by other family members. We believe in shared responsibilities.
Amongst things that didn't get thrown away, I came across a circa 1950s New York Telephone company bill for our home in Flushing. I don't think it exceeded $5.
Message units. Do you remember message units, those tiny 7¢ charges that landed on your bill when you used more than the 30 they gave you at the outset of the billing cycle? If you do, you're as old, or older than I am. If you are my age, or older, and claim you do not know what a message unit was, you've been lying about your age to people.
If you made calls outside your zone, or the series of first three numbers in a phone number, you incurred message unit charges faster. Of course it wasn't three digits that started a number, it was an exchange and a number. Ours Was FL-9 for Flushing. Get it.
Of course, the alpha notation gave way to just numbers. Our number once was 358-. The 3 and 5 correspond to an F and an L on the phone keypad, which really hasn't changed since phones allowed direct dial calling.
My father was a notorious non-payer of bills. We once had our electricity turned off by Con Edison. It takes a big arrears before Con Ed comes to block your electricity. We lost phone service many tines; our number was always getting changed when the service was restored. My father was a baffling man.
He was a college-educated engineer who was never unemployed. He was a career naval engineer in the Design Division at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It just seems he could never get it in his head that bills needed to be paid on time. Fuel oil delivery for the home was very erratic. We wore sweaters quite a bit, not that my father did. He was always at the family flower shop and barely spent anytime at home. He never seemed to be cold. It must have been his scotch intake.
My $200+ phone bills always gets paid on time, and includes fast Internet service, and a cable bill package that gives me way more than I'm sure I need. I get access to a lot of hockey teams that I really don't care about anymore. Things need to change.
But, the streaming channel of Showtime was always worth it. I got Homeland, and then Billions, shows I watched religiously and wrote about often. I've looked back and am surprised how often I summarized the episodes.
Then there was The Americans. I forget who carried that, but that was another show I enjoyed. All that does not even include the streaming subscription services like Amazon Prime, Acorn, BritBox, PBS Masterpiece, and MHz. I'm a sucker for foreign police procedurals. I don't mind the subtitles. However, I do not watch shows that are dubbed. The disconnect between the speech and the mouth is too distracting.
When Homeland ended on Showtime I missed it. But then Billions took over, and the entertainment continued. And of course the Brit Damian Lewis found continued work on Billions that no longer put his life in danger.
Does anyone think like I do that Lewis's puss/grimace reminds you of Steve McQueen? It's the face you make when you suck on a lemon. You'd be forgiven for thinking Damian and Steve came from the same set of parents, which of course they didn't.
Maybe it was always there, but there is too much palaver and blather in the show. I'm not expecting gunfire or chase scenes, but the rhetoric is fatiguing. But, I'm slowly making my way through what I think are 8 episodes. Definitely not binging. Then cancellation will loom again.
The home page of NetFlix attracted me to the access of what I'm guessing will be all 96 of Homeland's episodes, over the show's 8 seasons from 2011 to 2020. So my plans to quickly watch The Diplomat and drop NetFlix has been delayed. I've already paid for my second month of NetFlix access in order to enjoy Homeland again.
When first shown, I missed some of the very first episodes of Homeland, so the NetFlix access was a great opportunity to see what I missed. Apparently, not a lot, because it may have only been 2 or 3 episodes I missed when the show first aired.
The whole saga has come back to me; missing however are some of th brushstrokes that get you there. So, I've committed myself to watching up to the birth of Franny, the child Carrie Mathison had after her fairly constant lovemaking with Sgt. Brody.
Carrie always seems to exhibit a bit of a runaway libido. It becomes evident with Brody out of the picture for now walking across the Canadian border in order to try and disappear, when Carrie brings home a good looking customer from the liquor store and together they test the strength of her carpeted staircase.
Right now I've just watched through the first episode of Season 3. The Senate committees are all over the C.I.A., but we know where that's going.
There are always new things you notice when you look at something for a second time. The episodes open with a series of shots of different places and people speaking sound bites. There is a view from a vehicle of the sign on the way into Langley: George Bush Center for Intelligence. I get that,. But what does FHWA in large letters below it mean?
Well, I'll tell you. Amongst what I'm sure are several buildings lies the Federal Highway Administration. FHWA. It seems like an unlikely pairing of government agencies, but, as they say these days: it is what it is.
I always try and read the credits, wither at the beginning or at the end. Somewhere in Season 2 an actor named Timothée Chalamet appears. Timothée plays Vice President William Walden's teenage son, Finn, who becomes attracted to Sgt. Brody's teenage daughter Dana, who together get into a good bit of trouble while Finn is driving, hitting a pedestrian while speeding and evading his Secret Service detail that was trying to keep up, and leaving the scene. A hit and run. The woman who was hit later dies in the hospital from her injuries. The coverup starts.
Chalamet is well casted, and of course goes onto greater roles, notably playing Bob Dylan in the movie A Complete Unknown and earning an Oscar nomination.
It used to be when someone got famous you could look back, or were told to look back, and see them selling Volkswagens once upon a time. Now they get famous, and then appear in commercials.
I chose the cheapest tier of NetFlix membership. As such, I'm exposed to commercials every now and then during the show. One commercial, which I will admit I fail to understand, but no doubt that's because I'm 76, was for $CashApp. Guess who I recognized in it? Yep. Timothée himself. I'm assuming his appearance is after the notoriety he earned playing Bob Dylan and singing in A Complete Unknown.
I love acknowledging a piece of dialog that I forgot I once heard, but now that I've head it again, I find it worth memorializing. Saul and Carrie go way back, and he tells her he knew her from when he could "piss straight."
Thank you Saul, who plays a senior C.I.A. operative who is considered old. At this point in my advanced age I too find it hard to piss straight, no matter how hard I concentrate on it. I'm forever wiping the floor up with toilet paper. I just can't seem to get the nozzle to aim straight and not spray an annoying multi-directional mist. TMI? Too bad.
Also along the way, fairly early in the first season, there is a scene which I now will never forget. Saul is interrogating a member of al-Qaeda who has been extracted from a hovel in Pakistan.
The guy is hardly happy to be in the room, shackled and probably naked, having to listen to this bearded mass of a man, Saul Berenson, sit down and open a folder that has his picture and background information.
Saul picks up the folder, opens it and calls the subject a terrorist. Saul then tells the subject he also appears to be religious. Saul skips a beat and then says in his theatrical baritone, "so you're religious and a terrorist...what are you, Catholic?" So far, there is no answer.
I nearly fell off my chair.
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