Everyone is saying Homeland isn’t as good since the first series. MoL thought the second series better because when US TV tries to picture Arab life it goes woozy. Everyone says the first two episodes of series three have been dull with no Brody. Is this a man thing? Brody is so Burt Lancaster, so MoL, that without him as the fulcrum you are left with a bunch of difficult women. The critics are moaning but MoL has no problems because, like Carrie, MoL is more interesting off its meds. The mother’s conflict with her daughter, who most viewers seem to hate but is great, is more diverting than CIA shenanigans. (Trust me, says Saul while his teddy-bear eyes do Machiavelli.) It is a good time for daughters on American TV, going back to Elizabeth Moss in the The West Wing, through The Sopranos and Mad Men. Brody was back for episode three which saw both him and Carrie in a dark place, held against their will and being force-fed drugs! And in Brodie’s shit-hole there was an incredibly beautiful and manicured girl, (plus the previous number one baddie from Homicide, looking like he was in the world’s worst witness protection programme). One half of the episode was because someone had seen French Connection II (Gene Hackman in a strange land getting shot up with drugs) and the other because someone remembered One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The hard work that had gone into suicidal daughters, depressive mothers and a bi-polar heroine went out of the window faster than the man they chucked off the building. Probably the reason the Homicide guy was there was because the episode was directed by Clark Johnson who had acted in that show too. MoL had no argument with the directing per se, which created an arresting counterflow, and was taut and efficient in a Don Siegel way, making you believe the nightmare of the situation if not the bigger picture.