DVD review: Homeland Season 2 (15)

Claire Danes, Damian Lewis (609 mins)

What a difference a season makes. When this paranoid thriller first emerged, it was an instant favourite of the HBO classes, generating high suspense and political subversiveness from the cat-and-mouse antics of Clare Danes’s bipolar CIA agent and Damian Lewis’s Iraq-War-vet-cum-possible-al-Qa’ida convert.

But the premise also seemed to lend itself to a mini-series rather than an on-running one – and, duly, this second run of 12 episodes falls into 24-style ludicrousness as it tries to keep the suspense going. Which doesn’t make it an entirely awful show, just a more obvious one. Superior still, though, is the scintillating Danes.