3 8 June 2017
‘24’ and ‘Homeland’ predicted a a female
President and more or less Obama, but not
Trump whose world seems to feature in
Designated Survivor
by Cormac Deane
A
FTER A couple of stuttering seasons, Season
6 of ‘Homeland’, which ended in April, pulled
off a decently gripping story this time round.
The writers make life difficult for themselves,
as with its predecessor ‘24’, by making
daring near-future predictions about the political reality
that will be in place by the time the show airs.
‘24’, with its never-ending terrorist emergency, struck
a lucky chord when it came to screens in the first week
of November 2001, at the height of post-9/11 hysteria.
That show ran for eight seasons, and in fact still pro-
duces the odd additional couple of hours of material,
though the quality, always dodgy, really is inexcusable
at this point. Many things appealed in ‘24’ – Kiefer
Sutherland’s depressive charisma, Chloe O’Brian’s
Aspergersy fixity of purpose, the sneering and maniacal
baddies, and, a consistent ingredient, the palace intrigue
surrounding the US President.
Even before Barack Obama became the junior senator
for Illinois, and while Hillary Clin-
ton was the senator for New York,
‘24’ had two black Presidents and
one female President, all establish-
ment-liberals in exactly the
Obama-cum-Clinton mode. These
seem daringly prescient at this
remove, though at the time they
felt rather poorly paced. The black
Presidents pre-dated Obama by
too long and so seemed too far-
fetched, and Clinton never even got
her party’s nomination in 2008.
‘Homeland’ picked up where ‘24’ left off in several
other respects. Although it has always positioned itself
as a rather more intelligent version of things, it has con
-
tinued the steady stream of terrorism-induced paranoid
fear and sustained our fascination with the alternately
high-functioning/highly dysfunctional US security
Reality
as mad as TV
In 24, when enemies met
face to face they would be
trying to cut each other’s
fingers off or somesuch. In
‘Homeland’, we’re in a more
interesting milieu of Russian
agents who we feel are really
idiosyncratic failed novelists
MEDIA
‘Homeland’
June 2017 3 9
apparatus. Its slower pace has always given it a more
measured air, and its relatively considered depiction of
mental illness (bipolar disorder) leaves ‘24’’s depiction
of its array of gibbering misfits, Jack Bauer chief among
them, look like the parts cut out for being too incoherent
from the fantasy world of a Tom-Clancy-inspired 4chan-
ner who cannot make eye contact with anyone but his
dog and his mother.
‘Homeland’ even has a tang of John le Carré-lite with
its nostalgic sequences of good old-fashioned spycraft
and face-to-face encounters between old rivals and ene-
mies. In ‘24’, most of the time the connection between
the good guys and the bad guys was mediated by a sur
-
feit of fantasy surveillance technology, and when
enemies met face to face they were usually in a homicidal
mood, or at least they would be trying to cut each other’s
fingers off or somesuch. In ‘Homeland’, we’re in a more
interesting milieu of Russian agents who we feel are
really idiosyncratic failed novelists, Iranians who are
ruthless and entirely secular Realpolitikers, and Israelis
who are weird self-deceiving liars, with the tanned
unblinking vacuousness of hothoused transnational pro-
fessional tennis players.
With the first episode of season 6 coming out in the
days running up to the inauguration of Donald Trump,
‘Homeland’’s bad luck was to forecast a Democrat-style
woman as the brand new President-elect. It would have
been great to see this drama unfold parallel to the first
months of Hillary Clinton’s term in office, but instead it
just felt like they’d backed the
wrong horse, like most of the rest
of the media. It would be interest
-
ing to know how much time and
leeway the makers had in skewing
the narrative to bring it into line
with the phantasmagoria of
Trumpism. Because one thing they
get spot-on is the alt-right racists
and America Firsters, whose tac-
tics are borrowed straight from
the Russian hacker playbook and
whose vitriolic rhetoric (brilliantly
ventilated by Jake Weber) blends elements of Rush Lim-
baugh, Stephen Miller, Bill O’Reilly, and Richard
Spencer.
In this story, these guys are on the losing side, and
they do all they can to destroy the President and the
Presidency from within. What the show did not dare to
predict was victory for Trump. They can hardly be blamed
– if they did have a Trump-style victor but with no corre-
sponding real-world Trump victory, the show would come
across as a rather dystopian paranoia-fest. Whatever the
case, what their choices provide proof of, if it were
needed, is that these shows are the dream of American
Hollywood liberalism. This is not immediately apparent,
especially to us politically anaemic Europeans, but these
TV shows of political nightmares, permanent wars,
state-sanctioned torture, the State on the brink of attack
and its values under constant attack from its own secu-
rity services, are ultimately stabilising for the American
self-image and even for the American State itself.
Clinton was more of the same dressed up as a change
(the first female President!), Trump was something
different (the first unpredictable President!). Despite
their seemingly nightmare visions, these shows did not
predict Trump. He has proved literally unpredictable.
This is part of his uncanniness, narratively speaking. In
the normal run of things, our fears, racisms and intoler
-
ances can be effectively masked by narratives about
terrorism and intelligence and prediction, prevention
and risk and probability, and that is part of the magic
formula of ‘Homeland’. In the early seasons, we could
hate the Islamic terrorist villain and fervently support
the extraordinary reach of the security apparatus to
catch him, all the while not feeling like racists because
he was a red-haired, white-skinned American, played by
an Englishman (Damian Lewis).
What job is left for these narratives to do now? The
Trumpian disruption could well provide yet another
threatening obstacle that will provide the opportunity
for shows like these to depict the ever-evolving deep-
State establishment triumphant once more. This
desperately needs to happen in order for things to carry
on roughly in the same mode, both in the world of screen
fantasies and in the real world of politics, which are not
two separate realms. But the other danger is that the
Trumpian disruption will, when it ebbs, leave behind the
full normalisation of the extraordinary measures under-
taken by surveillance (private and public) and by
neoliberal economic reform (private and public), which
got its great initial momentum with the election of
George W. Bush, and its anabolic steroid boost from the
9/11 defeat.
An attempt to take up the torch of permanent-emer-
gency US TV drama has meanwhile been made by
Designated Survivor, which features Kiefer Sutherland
as a nothing-burger technocrat who is thrust into the
Presidency when the entire US cabinet, Congress and
Supreme Court are blown to pieces. Sutherland, always
a struggling actor, struggles to convince without a gun
in his hand, a live satellite feed in his earpiece and dead
guys all around him. But this may turn out to be very
clever casting, as the whole point of his character is that
he does not know how to play the part of the President.
This reviewer has not yet caught up with the latest epi
-
sode at the time of going to press, so those readers who
watch this execrable tosh may well have a more precise
verdict on Sutherland’s performance.
A nice twist ended season 6 of ‘Homeland’. The very
liberal President is unswayed by the dastardly attempts
to push her towards a hawkish foreign policy. Dark forces
within the CIA, puppeted by the Israelis, grow desperate
and go for a plain old putsch. Our heroes intervene, kill
the bad guys, save the President’s life (just about), and
save the Presidency. That’s normal enough. But the twist
comes late in the final episode, when we see that the
shock of the attack has finally swayed the President, and
the new normal is a repressive, Stalinesque police state
of group arrests and constant paranoia. This builds enor-
mous political pressure into the as-yet-unwritten next
season, endowing it with a good mix of predictability and
unpredictability, and it gives us a good reason to tune in
next time.
Cormac Deane lectures in film and media in the
Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
These TV shows of
political nightmares,
the State on the brink
of attack and its
values under constant
attack from its own
security services, are
ultimately stabilising
for the American self-
image and even the
State

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