HOWARD GORDON TALKS ABOUT TV’S ANTI-TERROR EVOLUTION: BARRI WEISS
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303796404579099093710582718.html
Howard Gordon, the lead writer for ’24’ and co-creator of ‘Homeland,’ talks about the collision of news and popular culture in post-9/11 America.
Imagine this: The daughter of a British soldier, left traumatized by her parents’ divorce, finds a surrogate family among her Muslim neighbors. The teenager converts to Islam and marries a Jamaican immigrant who blows himself up on the London tube, leaving her alone with two young children. She, too, has become radicalized, flees to East Africa, becomes a high-ranking member of an al Qaeda affiliate, travels on a forged South African passport and is dubbed by tabloids the “White Widow.”
It sounds like the plot of TV drama like “24,” or, more recently, the acclaimed “Homeland,” whose third season premieres Sunday on Showtime. In fact, it’s the real-life story of British national Samantha Lewthwaite, who is suspected of participating in last weekend’s bloody terror attack on Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall.
Howard Gordon, the lead writer and executive producer on “24” and the co-creator of “Homeland,” hadn’t heard of the White Widow connection to the Westgate slaughter when I reached him, via Skype, in Morocco on the set of his new TV pilot pegged to the Arab Spring. Then again, he has already imagined her: In the first season of “Homeland,” a well-off white American woman, disillusioned with her country, betrays her family by joining the jihadists.
It wouldn’t be the first time Mr. Gordon and his longtime writing partner, Alex Gansa, have seemed to predict the future. In 2002, “24” put a black president in the White House long before most Americans had heard of Barack Obama. A “24” storyline begun October 2002, five months before the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein, depicted Washington initiating military action against several Middle Eastern countries on “trumped-up evidence.” “We may have been breaking the story before the real thing happened,” says Mr. Gordon wryly.
By depicting the war on terror, they and their fictional creations have stirred intense political debate and controversy. With “Homeland,” the 52-year-old Mr. Gordon has been forced to defend himself against charges that he’s humanizing people like Osama bin Laden. This, only a few years after he helped create Jack Bauer, the terrorist-killing machine of “24.” The arc of Mr. Gordon’s career is a tour through the interplay of politics and popular culture in post-9/11 America.
In 2001, before al Qaeda attacked the U.S., Mr. Gordon was working on “Ball and Chain,” a pilot for Fox about a couple with superhuman powers. Then the network called to say Fox was dropping his show and going with “24,” created by Bob Cochran and outspoken conservative Joel Surnow. They wanted to bring Mr. Gordon on board. He watched the pilot that day—”unbelievable,” in a good way—and was sold. “I got the call on a Friday, had coffee with Joel and Bob Saturday, and was on the show by Monday.”
A few weeks before the “24” premiere, the 9/11 attacks occurred. “It changed everything. The Earth tilted and it never has righted itself,” says Mr. Gordon. “So ’24’ was created before 9/11, not after it, but it certainly influenced the way we wrote it and the way people watched it was profoundly affected by this fact.”
The show, starring Kiefer Sutherland as superagent Jack Bauer, who stops at nothing to prevent terror attacks, would help define the post-9/11 era, dramatizing the still-furious debate about the proper balance between civil liberties and national security during wartime. It ran for eight seasons and won 20 Emmys.
Mr. Gordon was already a seasoned writer and producer when he joined “24,” but the burdens of making entertainment about a war the U.S. is still fighting are different than those of, say, “The X-Files” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” two of his previous efforts. “I didn’t have any vampires or aliens to talk to, so the research is a little different,” he quips, but the bigger difference is that the plots of “24” and “Homeland” resonate with real life.
“I think after 9/11 we all were afraid and angry at the terrorists and angry at the bureaucracy that had the failure of imagination and the intelligence gap and couldn’t put the pieces together,” he says. “I think people watch that—whether it was consciously or not—and got behind Jack in a different way than they would had 9/11 not happened.” At least that was the case until, as Mr. Gordon delicately puts it, “history and current events . . . happened to the show.”
“There was no mention of Jack Bauer’s methods prior to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo,” Mr. Gordon says. After those events, “I think whatever wish fulfillment Jack represented became . . . darker, took on a darker complexion.”
That’s an understatement. By 2007, Newsweek had dubbed the hit a “neocon sex fantasy.” Jack Bauer suddenly wasn’t a gritty hero but Dick Cheney in a leather jacket.
Yet as Mr. Gordon points out, both the show’s fans—from Rush Limbaugh to Barbra Streisand—and its makers ran the political gamut. “I’m a registered Democrat and the staff went to the right of Attila the Hun and to the left of Che Guevara. So the idea that there were talking points or some kind of agenda we were promoting is pretty insane,” he says. “There are sort of these specious points—even the fact that the show was produced by Fox and people would draw the line between Fox News and ’24’ as if we were next door to them.”
Did he lose friends in Los Angeles when the show became politically passé? “I didn’t lose friends, but I got into what I felt like were surreal conversations with people. You know: ‘I used to love “24” but then I found out it was bad.’ ” Mr. Gordon and his team weren’t immune from the criticism. A turning point was a plot in season four about a sleeper cell—the terrorist family living next door—that outraged Muslim advocacy groups.
Such backlash made its way into the writer’s room. “They sensitized us,” Mr. Gordon admits of groups like the Council of American-Islamic Relations. The show took the extraordinary step during that season of running a kind of public-service announcement from Kiefer Sutherland, in which he told viewers that “the American Muslim community stands firmly beside their fellow Americans in denouncing and resisting all forms of terrorism.”
‘You don’t want to be the midwife of xenophobia,” Mr. Gordon says. “But at the same time, you have to recognize that the people who perpetrated 9/11 did so in the name of their faith.” Swapping out Muslim Arab terrorists for Swedes wasn’t an option. But Mr. Gordon and his colleagues took the criticism seriously enough that it affected the way they wrote the main characters. “The way we reflected it without dishonoring or discounting the show that we built was to have Jack Bauer acknowledge the darkness himself.”
In this context, it’s hard not to see “Homeland” as an inversion of “24,” and even as an apology for the political incorrectness of “24” and its clear idea of justice. Mr. Gordon isn’t having it: “People said that ‘Homeland’ was somehow an apology or some kind of act of penitence on our part. And that’s not really quite accurate.” Instead, he sees it as the next chapter of the war on terror and its representation. “It was an evolution of the same story . . . of terrorism and the sort of price we paid for still being in this,” he says. “It was a show that really could only be told 10 years after 9/11.”
“Homeland,” which is based on the Israeli drama “Hatufim,” is about a Marine who returns home after eight years in terrorist captivity in the Middle East. The U.S.—including the top echelons of power in Washington—welcomes Sgt. Nicholas Brody as a war hero. But CIA agent Carrie Mathison rightly suspects that he has been turned into an Islamist sleeper agent. She is determined to reveal the truth—but along the way must grapple with bipolar disorder and the minor detail that she has fallen in love with Brody.
The heroes and bad guys in “Homeland” aren’t neatly drawn. People are not exactly as they seem. And everyone, including the terrorists, has reasons for what they do. “I think we’re reflecting: Everybody is traumatized by what they’ve been through in small and big ways,” Mr. Gordon says.
“When Alex and I started it, we sort of started from the fact that there hadn’t been a terrorist attack—certainly not a successful one—on the homeland since 9/11. We liked the idea of the threat being real, but people kind of reflecting a kind of fear fatigue and that Carrie was the only person whose flame was still burning brightly,” he says.
Played by Claire Danes, Carrie is fighting the same war as Jack Bauer—against terrorism, and against higher-ups in a bureaucracy who don’t get it—but she’s doing it in a different political context. The weapon she uses, her intelligence, is subtler than Bauer’s neck-snapping. Still, “Homeland” has been criticized for making terrorists seem too reasonable, even admirable, especially compared with the show’s one-dimensional right-wing vice president.
Mr. Gordon responds: “I think we are always clear that Abu Nazir”—the show’s terrorist mastermind—”is a bad guy. I just think you get a much more interesting bad guy when you understand him. He is always and forever our villain. But villains often think they are doing the right thing. And if you can animate that right thing, that idea, I think you are doing your job as an artist.”
Mr. Gordon doesn’t mention this, but perhaps “Homeland” is unintentionally doing something even more profound: It’s helping Americans recognize that terrorists do what they do because they are serious about ideas—however warped and murderous—and not because the terrorists are poor or oppressed.
Nor is Mr. Gordon in doubt about where his own political sympathies lie. Speaking about his love for America, he says: “For all its problems, I believe it is a model in many ways. I’ve always appreciated what it stood for and where it has stood in the course of political history. As the flower of the Enlightenment, I just think America is an amazing, amazing heterogeneous place where it’s not tribal, but there is basically law and order and transparency and these amazing institutions.” In what other country can a Jew from New York make his name and fortune channeling presidents and jihadists?
What’s next? In May, Fox is bringing back “24” for a 12-episode series called “24: Live Another Day,” which Mr. Gordon is producing. With Mr. Gansa running “Homeland,” Mr. Gordon is focusing on “Tyrant,” a show that takes a fresh look at violence emanating from the Middle East.
“Tyrant” is about a Muslim-American pediatrician named Barry Al Fayeed who is living a normal life in Florida but “happens to have a father who is a dictator of an unnamed Middle Eastern country,” as Mr. Gordon puts it, and a brother “who’s reminiscent of Uday Hussein.” Viewers may be reminded that Bashar Assad was an ophthalmologist in London before succeeding his father as Syria’s dictator. In the show, Fayeed returns home with his family after 20 years to attend a nephew’s wedding. When his father suffers a stroke, Fayeed decides to stay.
Given Mr. Gordon’s track record, “Tyrant”—the pilot was written by Gideon Raff, the Israeli creator of “Hatufim,” who is also a producer—has sparked much industry buzz, but Mr. Gordon demurs: “I like to keep expectations low.”
What’s clear is that, like “24” and “Homeland,” the drama will reflect the political moment. “There are characters and events that are spliced from things we’re seeing in Egypt or Syria, Yemen—absolutely. This is a reflection of the Arab Spring, for sure.” Call it chapter three in a career that has held up a mirror to post-9/11 America.
Ms. Weiss is the associate editorial features editor at the Journal.
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