1 min read
I'm 90 per cent of the way through the first series of Homeland, and I'm as hooked as everyone said I would be (nb: do not tell me what happens, I'll get there eventually). Its almighty awards grab at the Emmy awards on Sunday has confirmed it not only as the programme of choice for the masses, but the top pick of the critics too.
Must be tough for the Israel boycotters out there, of course, that the hit show of the year started life as an Israeli series about Israeli soldiers captured in war while fighting for the survival of the Jewish state.
Inconvenient, perhaps, that Homeland's writer, Gideon Raff, is an Israeli, and that episodes of the eagerly awaited second series have again been filmed in Israel.
The icing on the cake? Claire Danes, the show's star actress, gave an interview to the New York Times style magazine this week, gushing about how much she loved Israel.
"The night life is incredibly alive, and there is an extremely positive and generous spirit towards us," she said. ""We went to Jerusalem and Masada and all these absolutely edifying and riveting places."
She did acknowledge the conflict, commenting: "The tension was palpable… but I didn't ever feel particularly threatened… It has been a lot more fun and cosmopolitan than I had anticipated."
To add insult to an injury, the interview was accompanied by a photo shoot in Jaffa. Claire Danes, modelling fashionable clothes in a cosmopolitan city where Arabs and Jews live side by side.
But of course, if you support a cultural boycott of Israel, you couldn't possibly tune in to season two, could you now?
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