Homeland is an American psychological thriller television drama series developed for American television by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa and loosely based on the Israeli series Hatufim created by Gideon Raff which originally centred on Carrie Mathison, a CIA officer and Nicholas Brody, a U.S. Marine, after Mathison has come to believe that Brody, who was held captive by Al-Qaeda as a prisoner of war, was turned by the enemy and now threatens the United States.
Who's the hero – who's the threat?
When MIA Marine Sgt. Nicholas Brody returns home to a hero's welcome after eight years in enemy confinement, brilliant but volatile CIA agent Carrie Mathison isn't buying his story. She believes that Brody has been turned and is now working for Al-Qaeda.
What follows is a dangerous game of cat and mouse with nothing short of American national security at stake.
Maverick CIA agent Mathison doesn't like playing by the rules. Haunted by her failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks, she is determined to ward off further terrorism against U.S. targets, almost at any cost.
She is already skating on thin ice within the CIA after a disastrous attempt to get information from a condemned Iraqi source sparks a diplomatic crisis.
But Carrie was able to get a small piece of unsettling secret intelligence from her source before he died, and she is convinced it has alarming significance to the return of MIA Sgt. Nicholas Brody.
The crucial question is, is Carrie's conviction based on fact or is it the product of a delusional obsession?
Mathison's unorthodox investigation of threats to U.S. security in Iraq leads to a serious diplomatic incident, and Carrie is stripped of her field status and assigned to a desk job.
But along the way she learns from her sources that an American Prisoner of War has been turned. When Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, Missing in Action for eight years and presumed dead, is suddenly recovered in Afghanistan, the timing is too suspicious for Carrie to ignore. She must break protocol in order to prove her theory that Brody now poses a major threat to his own country.
Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, Morena Baccarin, David Harewood, Diego Klattenhoff, Jackson Pace, Morgan Saylor and Mandy Patinkin star in the provocative, suspenseful series from the executive producers of 24.