“Is Marijuana expensive” - Betty Draper

Todd VanDerWerff, AV Club 
Season 5, Episode 2

“Nothing will ever quite fill the hole”

(via youandthemountains)

A number of critics I care for dearly and admire were quick to declare Mad Men a vastly superior show to Homeland, which in the final analysis of history, may prove correct. But there’s something brave and bracing to me about the way Homeland has tackled the issues and environment of our own time, rather than reaching back into our history to explore the psychological contours of debates that are essentially settled, and settled for the better. Mad Men explores a broader universe through the lens of its advertising agency (and its much larger core cast) than Homeland does from within the intelligence community, but it sometimes does so with less courage. It’s a show that’s much more interested in exploring Don Draper’s reaction to having to put up with a token black employee than with the experiences of Dawn, SCDP’s African-American pioneer, herself. The show tells us that sexism is damaging to both men and women, and than white men could be shocked when their obliviousness was breached. These are things I think we know, gussied up in beautiful clothes and gilded with performances that are sometimes exceptional.

Homeland, by contrast, is concerned with the urgent present rather than the weight of history. At a moment when President Obama’s drone program raises profoundly difficult questions about how to regulate the president’s right to kill, Homeland has charged into the debate with an exploration of the impact of the people who are killed because they are in the way of drone strikes, and how those strikes can be used to powerfully shift opinion against the United States. At a time when large numbers of Americans persist, against all evidence and reason, in believing that our president is a foreigner and a secret Muslim so they won’t have to accept that their nation actually chose a black man to occupy its highest office, Homeland has given us a sensitive, even tender portrait of a convert to Islam, presenting the practice of his faith as beautiful and sanctified, who hides his religion (something that will become an issue in the second season premiere next Sunday). And in Carrie Mathison, Homeland‘s given us a female lead who is damaged less by history than by the things that make her brilliant. These are narrower concerns than the broad societal forces Mad Menexplores, but that specificity doesn’t make the show less bold: instead, it makes it more painful and immediate.

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