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Homeland

'Homeland' hits New York as it mirrors Trump's transition

Maeve McDermott
USATODAY

NEW YORK — After withstanding five seasons of terrorist plots and psychological turmoil, the heroes of Homeland almost met their downfall in Donald Trump.

Claire Danes, who plays Carrie Mathison (seen here with Dominic Fumusa), says the mere fact 'Homeland' is shooting in Brooklyn unnerves her fellow New Yorkers. They tell her "It seems menacing, it’s a bad omen," she says.

"It threw us into a moment of panic, just wondering if the events we were dramatizing would be anywhere near as scary as what was unfolding on the world stage," executive producer Alex Gansa says, recounting the days after Trump's election.

The Showtime series’ sixth season, due Sunday (9  ET/PT), lands in New York, after previous stints in Berlin, South Africa and Charlotte. Instead of chronicling the latest international mission of ex-CIA agent Carrie Mathison(Claire Danes), the new season zeroes in on presidential politics, unfolding in the 72 days between the election of Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel) as president and her inauguration.

She may be a former Democratic senator from New York, but Keane isn't a stand-in for Hillary Clinton. Instead, she channels Trump by sparring with intelligence agencies over her more radical views.

Meanwhile, Carrie is working as an advocate for American Muslims unfairly targeted for discrimination. Unsurprisingly, her work inevitably draws her back into the orbit of Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), a visit to Homeland’s Brooklyn set revealed.  A corner of the sprawling studio on the East River was transformed into Keane’s transition headquarters. In a pivotal scene airing late in the season, Mathison and Berenson present the president-elect with evidence that another major character is misleading her to influence her Iran policy.

The new season takes place between the election and inauguration of President-elect Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel, 'House of Cards').

The season reveals many parallels between Keane's transition and the president-elect's, and Gansa's initial fears  faded as he watched Trump begin feuding with his own intelligence community.

“We’re breathing a sigh of relief, because right after Trump got elected, we all worried for a while that we were going to be irrelevant,” Gansa said. “And as events developed in the real world, the story we were telling had some relevance.”

“Most of it is (the writers’) effort and application and diligence, but some of it is luck,” Danes said. “There are certain things that happen in our story that are just twinned with what’s happening in the world in an uncanny way.”

The show, wrapping production this month, was able to tweak episodes in real time, in response to the latest real-world drama.

“There was a scene that was delivered to me, and I got a text from Alex that he was re-writing it,” Patinkin says, “and it absolutely echoes everything that’s going on in the transition with the real-world conflicts between the president-elect and the intelligence community.”

The CIA's Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin, center) and Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham) confer with Gen. Jamie McLeondon (Robert Knepper, left) in the Season 6 premiere of 'Homeland.'

Further blurring the line between the real and fictional transitions, Homeland even shares consultants with the Trump team, whom Gansa declined to name.

As a result, Homeland “is no longer entertainment,” Patinkin says.  “It has morphed into something far more layered and meaningful than just entertainment. It is truly a chronicle, in the poetic sense, of the world we are living in.”

After shooting recent seasons abroad, Gansa’s top priority was reuniting Danes with her husband, actor Hugh Dancy, and their 4-year-old son, Cyrus, at their home in the West Village.

“It wasn’t really a function of bringing Carrie back to New York, it was a function of bringing Claire back to New York,” he says. “Claire’s got family, she’s got a little boy, she wanted to come home. So we started with Claire coming home, and we sorted out a story about Carrie coming home as well.”

“I’m not sure where we’ll go next, but it’s a reprieve,” Danes said. “I get to integrate my actual life with my fictional one.”

But the new locale made sense. “Homeland security is so much about 9/11, and there’s real value to returning to the site of that,” she says. “This is where the injury happened, and I think it’s so psychically loaded.”

But some of Danes' fellow New Yorkers may need some convincing.

“Even at the hair salon, people will turn to me and say, ‘I don’t like that Homeland is shooting in New York, because it seems menacing, it’s a bad omen,' " she said. "People are superstitious about that.”

Season 6 finds Carrie (Claire Danes) working at a nonprofit on behalf of Muslim-Americans, to the dismay of her old CIA boss, Saul (Mandy Patinkin), who offered her full autonomy to return to the agency.
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