Holmes And Homeland

This is a really long post, mostly for my benefit. This is a long piece that argues for a subtle flaw I see in a lot of drama. It's a construct that has helped me understand how writing should proceed, and I'm sure someone will get something from this. But it's also over 3000 words long. Fair warning. -Alex

"Homeland" is such a disappointing show. True, I've only seen the first of 2+ seasons, but this first season suffers from such a fundamental problem of drama that it bears a little bit [okay it ended up being like 3000 words guys] of examination.

Quick refresher: The two main characters are Carrie Mathison (played by Claire Danes), a mentally unstable, generally tweaky CIA agent, and Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a mysterious U.S. Marine sniper captured by Al-Qaeda and bin Laden for several years (okay they changed all the names of the terrorists and organizations, heh). Brody is recovered by the CIA into the U.S. at the very start of the show and Mathison - who had heard credibly that al-Qaeda had "turned" an agent - is immediately suspicious of Brody. Brody and Mathison begin a complicated cat-and-mouse game involving unlawful intelligence, hand gestures, Islam, surreal romantic getaways, and mental illness. Brody tries to deal with his family in the wake of his long absence, and Mathison tries to deal with her illness.

And it's all a very neat premise, over-the-top enough to give us unforgettable images, but grounded enough to give us poignant characters. My personal experience was that "Homeland" was eminently watchable: The first season certainly had some great scenes, had excellent production values, and even had a few staggeringly awesome narrative constructions. But, in general narrative terms, it didn't stick to its guns and this in turn just made everything about the story and characters feel muddled and uneven. The bottom line: The writing wasn't taken seriously enough. The ending of the first season vexes me to this day (we'll get to that), and it suffers from the "Dexter" problem (among others) of ending the way that is most convenient for the television show instead of the way that is most narratively sound. It's an ending that poisons everything before it and even makes us re-evaluate what we liked in the first place.


Not taking the writing seriously is a common problem with shows. Going with the "Let's have a Season 2" instead of "Let's actually make the characters and drama build to an epic conclusion" is common and totally understandable. Who really cares about that? No, it shouldn't have beaten "Breaking Bad" and Bryan Cranston at the Emmys, but it was a good season of a probably good-overall show, and well-acted. "Homeland" was just fine.

My problem is that the failure in writing was so fundamental that it sort of brought everything down with it for me. See, I'm someone that values craft in writing so much that subtle flaws are enough to throw me into unspeakable rages characterized by outbursts of popcorn thrown at the screen. And it was such a specific failing, but also one so subtle that it was almost implacable. It's something that has taken me months to articulate. In other words, I'm not a hater, but I do have quite specific concerns that I feel an obligation to myself to articulate, because if you never have these conversations you're likely to repeat the mistakes yourself, in whole or in part. I don't want to put anyone through that that has to read my stuff. Hence, this piece.

Whatever the case, I'd been reading Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary "Sherlock Holmes" stories around the same time, and, well, if you're teaching a course on writing mystery, you could do worse than to teach only Sherlock Holmes. Fun mysteries, great unfolding of information, great character interaction, great pace... Look, I could go on, but suffice it to say that everything that is good about fiction is contained in the unfolding of even an average-quality Sherlock Holmes story. That's all I can say.

Well, not quite all I can say. The structure of a Sherlock Holmes story is delineated almost precisely by the unfolding of the information in that story's central mystery - a story tends to start with a brief Watson-Holmes anecdote or the knock on the door of the detective's apartment building that starts the mystery. And a story tends to end precisely with the revelation of the mystery and a brief resolution. Information is uncovered little by little, and Holmes (with canine vigor) goes to apparently random lengths and locales, only to find some trivial piece of information that (in his mind) ties all the rest together. Then Holmes solves the mystery, makes the appropriate arrests, and explains his reasoning to Watson. One fell swoop, and then The End. It's an amazingly simple, direct formula that almost thereby alone makes mystery a scalable, replicable, editable genre. The long-running show "House, M.D." basically used this formula without exception, and that formula (combined with Hugh Laurie's once-in-a-generation acting) garnered a lot of acclaim, even on a show with mostly weak supporting characters and writing that often felt strained.

Now, let me say this before going further: Sherlock Holmes may be the gold standard for mystery and detective fiction, but just because something fits into this genre doesn't mean it should have to fit into the shoes of Holmes. But, on the other hand, Holmes is so illustrative of what makes the genre work that it can be studied extensively and instructively. And for me, a huge principle that I've picked up from Holmes is a sort of exclusion principle between drama and mystery that points to a subtle and fragile interplay, and it's the central failing of "Homeland."

See, fundamentally, while the mysteries Holmes studies are themselves stories (a murder, adultery, or a burglary, etc.), in simple dramatic terms, the main story in a Holmes story is that of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson themselves solving the central mystery. The protagonist is Holmes (with an occasional clutch assist by Watson), his conflict is the mystery, his goal is to solve the mystery, and the antagonist is not simply the murderer but the various forces conspiring to stop him from solving the mystery, including his own ignorance and characters with motivations that want to lead Holmes off the trail. That's the Hero's Journey. That's the archetypal conflict-driven action. And, this is key, not the crimes themselves.

And that's an important distinction: We the readers are not solving the drama at the center of the mystery; we're solving the mystery as Holmes and Watson. The crimes themselves tend to be subtle and well-shaded tales, but they're what we are observing. And the evidence is staggered in each story so that we get the full human drama before Holmes solves the mystery. Holmes might only need a few pieces of evidence to solve the crime, but the drama underlying the mystery tends to be fascinating: As much as you want to solve the mystery, you want to get to know the characters. The characters that darken Holmes' door with a mystery have strived in dramatic angst. Absurd, unexplainable things have happened to them, and they have typically sent for Holmes as a last resort. Their very personal striving against forces they can't understand - forces often ultimately shown to be malice - stands in stark contrast to Holmes' impersonal, scientific, knowing hunt. The action unfolds to them, and they engage with the action.

The trick that Doyle rarely pulled off in short fiction was to have the best of both worlds - a detective solving a case that has real skin in the game - where the main story of solving the mystery also demands that the detective work through something personally. That's one place where longform mystery really thrives - "House, M.D." excels at this. And sure, Holmes and Watson would often end up in physical danger. But Holmes is essentially a detective-savant who is only activated by mystery, and Dr. Watson is mostly a pure, objective observer and companion who finds Holmes' methodology fascinating. They aren't characters so much as intellectual stand-ins for the reader, and Holmes' intellect - which is astonishing and impossible to pace in the universe of Holmes - almost never acts upon information totally inaccessible to the reader. Watson and Holmes are objective and scientific at their cores, following hunches ruthlessly, and the reader follows along, ostensibly with a magnifying glass of their own. Giving Watson and Holmes real characters with real, human foibles that affect the mystery would have interrupted the formula. If you force Holmes completely out of his element intellectually and force him to engage the story himself, not with cool dispassion but with the same stakes as his desperate clients, then you make solving the mystery in part not just a brilliant solution but a brilliant solution and the injection of Holmes' character overcoming that conflict. And suddenly, the reader is in danger of feeling jerked around -for now Holmes may not merely be aggregating clues and following hunches, but may be adding his own baggage as a person with needs and conflicts himself. His objectivity is necessarily compromised, and we'd start to wonder if he's leading us down a pathway for his own interests or if he really has a good theory. And suddenly you've added a second layer of mystery - and it's a separation and an abstraction between yourself and Holmes. Which doesn't do for short pieces, to put it mildly.

And tthat brings us to what "Homeland" does that is so fascinating and promising, and, in my opinion, ultimately the source of its failure. See, Mathison is trying to solve the puzzle of Brody, but endlessly compromises herself in doing so. In obsessing over Brody's actions and getting mired in her own illness, Mathison is from the get-go acting not on pure theories. Is Mathison acting from lust or because she's chasing a great lead? The show kneads this question into its dramatic core.

On the other hand, Brody is hiding all sorts of things, but of course the central question is of his allegiance: Has he indeed turned to Abu Nazir? It comes out that he clearly feels at least some allegiance to Nazir and goes a long way in participating in a plot with Nazir... but is fundamentally having some questions along the way about his true allegiance, about his family, about who are really his people. The problem as I see it with Brody is that it's a) not clear what his allegiance is at all, or even what his principles and priorities might be, to such an extent that he is a completely different human being depending on what he believes and b) we're supposed to empathize with him and care about his choices whatever he does.

And so, just as Mathison is an ostensible detective compromised into a dramatic character, Brody is a mystery that expands into a dramatic character. The detective is obsessed with the mystery, but the mystery reaches out and grabs the detective, and the detective is herself filled with mystery and characterization. And while that's an insanely cool premise (right?) in theory, in practice that can only work with a true dedication to the writing. That means letting "long games" play themselves out. That means letting characters' choices have real impact on their cases. That means, most of all, that to the extent that you present a detective as a dramatic character, that you can't let that drama harm the pleasure of the mystery unfolding. The impulsive, obsessed detective has to go where an objective detective wouldn't, and that has to lead to evidence and compromise in almost equal measure. The mystery man has to compromise his mystery in order to achieve his dramatic goals.

And "Homeland" doesn't do that. Mathison compromises herself almost arbitrarily for low gains - she is too much a character driven by impulse: She is too dramatic, in other words, to be the protagonist of a mystery. And Brody is holding insane amounts of information and goals and thoughts in reserve - we barely even know who or what he honestly cares about at any given time because the show likes to slowly reveal his backstory... so Brody ends up too mysterious to act as the protagonist of a drama.

In the end Brody doesn't pull the trigger on the brilliant terrorist plot that Abu Nazir had set him towards with a suicide bomb beneath the White House and any number of high-level government officials. That's the choice in the finale of the first season, and, while incredibly well-acted by Damian Lewis, the ending inspired nothing in me except generalized emotion towards a generalized person that had never really given us a full character. Brody has a family and he cares about that family, despite probably still remaining loyal to Abu Nazir over the United States. So Brody doesn't pull the trigger, despite great personal pressure to do so.

And it's unsatisfying. Okay, so dramatically speaking, there's nothing wrong with the ending: A protagonist makes a central choice on an internal conflict. Chooses life over death, chooses family over political principles. Fine. But then you step back, and take a look at those 12 hours, and you realize something terrible: If Brody chose death it would have been exactly the same justification: A protagonist makes a central choice on an internal conflict, death over life, principles over family.

That's what "Homeland" boils down to: Brody's choice has plenty of stakes and plenty of build-up, but whatever he chooses, there's not really a good reason either way. Your protagonist is such an arbitrary character, making choices arbitrarily, that you don't have any idea which way he'll choose until he does it. So dramatically speaking, while there's nothing wrong with either choice, there's something dramatically wrong about both, about a character that doesn't have enough substance to have a strong lean either way. There's something wrong with a dramatic choice that has no dramatic consequences. If we're being honest, we learn about Brody nothing more than that he made that choice, from the choice. Aside from the fact that he survives, we really don't know any better how he's going to handle his next choice, because the show still doesn't fill us in: we still don't know his damn allegiance, and he's still talking to Abu Nazir.

In a different world, maybe that choice is set up in a more dramatically meaningful way: Perhaps it's set up such that maybe Brody has done all sorts of things beforehand to establish his personality, but in the end is ruthless and would still pull the trigger on the bomb without hesitation. But despite his cerrtainty, maybe his conflict wouldn't be purely internal but would now involve direct external danger that he has to think on his feet to solve: Mathison is likely one step behind him and has disabled the bomb. And now Brody and Mathison must have a showdown. And our question becomes now a pure dramatic problem: We know all of a sudden who Brody is, and yet he is still formidable and a character and a force of nature. So, in this hypothetical, we set up Brody's character so that we are certain how he will respond when left to his own devices with the bomb. But we also force him to face a worthy opponent that suddenly has the opportunity to change his perspective and his resources and his endgame. I don't know if that's the way to go, but that ending makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.

Whatever the case, you don't necessarily have to be certain how a character will act in a situation, and if they never surprised you or got into new situations they wouldn't be very interesting, mere archetypes for a closed schema. But well, they should surprise you within the parameters of their established schema. A character should never come up with something completely unsupported by what'd come before so late in the game. A character should never face a choice with no prior analogue if they've been given ample time to develop. It's practically the definition of poorly-characterized or poorly-set-up.

And yet I don't want to go too far down the generalization rabbit-hole: in another universe, that poorly-characterized person is an excellent mystery man. In another universe they're the wild and unpredictable source of action, and their effect on other characters justifies their existence dramatically, and justifies the existence of hungry detectives that can solve the motivations of such an apparently interesting person.

The characters of a good Holmes story are objectified as purely dramatic characters that we haven't figured out yet, while Holmes and Watson stand as pure subjects that haven't figured it out yet either. The characters they study can act unpredictably because so can all of us until you know us better. But as we become mired in their story, as Holmes and Watson find more and more con men and desperate straits, we begin to notice motivations and patterns in these characters and an essential humanity in their tales. We start to figure them out, and then, once we understand them, we start to empathize with them and fear them and see their glares and desperation in the faces of passers-by to our own lives. And we start to intertwine and engage with the characters, bringing our own passions and motivations to bear in order to understand them better as subjects. We've heard their story, we see how they run from rooms and how they respond to being caught. Now we get them and want to see what the endgame is.

Unfortunately, we never get that pleasure with Brody. That finale where Brody makes his choice? Carrie wasn't even in the room, wasn't even nearby or in immediate danger when Brody made his crucial choice. Not that this would have characterized him more necessarily, but I can't help but feel somehow this robbed us of a great television moment, for Brody and Mathison to finally hash out their real issues with everything on the table, and for Mathison to explain everything she knows while Brody finally shows his true colors and nothing is left to doubt except the endgame (which, sure, make it ambiguous or ambivalent! Bring on Season 2!). But none of that happened. Even if the bomb had gone off, nothing dramatic would have happened. And so the endgame was wildly disappointing, like expecting to bite into cake and finding only paper and styrofoam.

The existential pleasures of mystery and drama must be combined subtly. The revelation of information is a careful art requiring guile and craft and endless thought. Likewise with the creation and interaction of characters. And, when there are commercial interests, good writing needs to be jealously nurtured and someone needs to shout that the interests of Season 2 cannot completely trump the interests of Season 1. Actors need writers and producers that will let them breathe in a role, will let that role become a consistent hat they can wear, perhaps changing with the seasons but never losing sight of what has come before. Mystery needs drama to be worth uncovering and drama needs mystery to keep us guessing. But when we're completely guessing about characters we're supposed to be uncovering? Then we've lost immersion, we've lost a sense of motivation, and the whole fictional apparatus crumbles under rudimentary skepticism. Such was "Homeland" for me.