Anyone into "Homeland"? I tried watching it when it first aired and couldn't get into it. The trailers made it look like some ripoff of "A Beautiful Mind" or something. I had avoided it since.
It won an Emmy for best drama, though... so I reluctantly gave it another shot. It's pretty entertaining. I blasted through the entire first season in about a week.
My only gripe has been that Claire Danes' character is incredibly annoying. My girlfriend couldn't even bother watching it, because of the constant darting eyes and ruffled chin. She almost overdoes it. I was thrilled to see SNL make fun of it this week:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/423747?playlist_id=1240 ... For the most part, she's been a bit less annoying in season 2.
I will say that the best part of the show was something I noticed early on and later heard confirmed in a podcast with the creator... their mentality when writing the show is to make stuff happen BEFORE you expect it to happen. In other words, you know certain things in the show are inevitable (like Brody and Carrie hooking up), but you don't expect it to happen as quickly as it does. It's actually really refreshing. They don't really drag stuff out like most shows do. Like for instance in "Breaking Bad" where you know from episode 1 that Dean will EVENTUALLY find out about Walt... but they drag that out until the last possible moment. With "Homeland' they would have shocked you with that inevitable reveal in episode 3 of Season 2 or something... and then from there you're stuck wondering, "wow... where can they go from here?!" For that, I give it a big thumbs up.