HOMELAND: Alex Gansa on the Series’ Second (Streaming) Life, Legacy – Give Me My Remote : Give Me My Remote
HOMELAND: Alex Gansa on the Series’ Second (Streaming) Life, Legacy
September 8, 2026 by Marisa Roffman
Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison in HOMELAND (Season 7, Episode 11, “All In”). – Photo: Kata Vermes/SHOWTIME – Photo ID: HOMELAND_711_1630.R.jpg
More than six years after HOMELAND ended its run, the series is seeing an unexpected resurgence.
“Netflix bought HOMELAND in November, and it’s having a complete second life on the streamer,” showrunner Alex Gansa told Give Me My Remote at Televerse. “All these people who never watched it on Showtime are watching it now. In fact, I heard an incredible statistic that during the week of December 22, one billion minutes of HOMELAND were viewed on Netflix.”
That’s not to say the series wasn’t successful during its original run, though. The drama, which followed CIA officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), ran for eight seasons and was an awards favorite, nabbing Emmys, Golden Globes, WGA Awards, TCA Awards, and a Peabody Award.
But, Gansa noted, the series was also very of its time…and likely would be impossible to try to put together now. “I don’t think you can put HOMELAND on the air right now in the current political climate,” he said. “I know that a lot of our consultants wouldn’t have come to speak to us anymore, for fear of retribution from the administration. And, you know, HOMELAND was a show that was fairly honest, and fairly critical, about America, and how America projected its power overseas. And I’m kind of missing that on television right now.”
The showrunner also misses writing for the characters within the world. “I do think about Carrie Mathison in Moscow [where she ended up in the series finale] in real life right now,” Gansa said. “Like, what would she be thinking about what’s going on in Ukraine and what’s going on in the Baltic? So I do think about those things, and those are the conversations that I tend to have with the people that used to consult on the show. So, she’s still there in my mind. And you do see Claire on television all the time, still doing her Carrie Mathison thing.” (Danes has starred in THE BEAST IN ME, FULL CIRCLE, FLEISHMAN IS IN TROUBLE, and THE ESSEX SERPENT since HOMELAND ended.)
Looking back at the series, Gansa acknowledged he was sentimental about a couple of important episodes.
“Obviously the pilot [which Gansa co-wrote with Howard Gordon and Gideon Raff] changed my life, and the finale [which he co-wrote with Gordon],” he said. “Because the finale was…you just want to land the airplane in a way that people don’t criticize too much. So those two episodes were the most difficult episodes to write and to do.”
“But along the way, there are just so many episodes, written by so many great writers,” he continued. “I think about Meredith Stiehm’s ’The Weekend’ [in] that first season was just an incredible episode. Chip Johannessen wrote an episode called ‘From A to B and Back Again’ in season 4 that, every time I see that, or rewatch it, just blew my mind. There are also a couple episodes that I always go back and re-read, and whenever I look at those episodes, I say to myself, ‘How on Earth did we do that?’ It’s just like, was that really us? Did we really make those episodes?”
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