The domestic terror threat might inch up with the news Tuesday that the next season of “Homeland” will be shot in New York City.
Showtime CEO David Nevins shared the location when I asked about “Homeland” updates at the TV Critics press tour Tuesday.
Last season’s “Homeland,” shot in Berlin, had an eerie similarity to terrorist plots exploding in Europe.
“The plot was really already done before world events started to coincide,” Nevins said. The show’s producers were about to stage the attempted terror attack on the Berlin train station the day after the Paris attacks.
“So we did have a conversation, and most of the conversation just revolved around what kind of warning, if any, we should put on the episode that was going to air on Sunday night.”
Eventually, Showtime ran what he described as “not really a disclaimer,” but “sort of a re reminder that ‘Homeland’ portrays events that are realistic in nature,” Nevins said. “But I think people, when they tune into ‘Homeland,’ they know what they’re they know what to expect.”
But the coincidences of last seasons may not have been that coincidental, he added. Writers for that show have an indication of how these things happen.
“I think it’s sort of an amazing feat of synthesis that these writers do,” he said. :What they do is they go and they talk to a lot of former CIA, NSA, a couple current people, some State department people; they talk to journalists about what’s going on. And they synthesized a lot of the themes.
“They heard about what was going on in Europe and they heard about ISIS sort of asserting itself in Europe, kind of wanting to make a name, sort of supplant al Qaeda in the West. They heard about sort of the post-Snowden changes and how electronic surveying is done.
“The U.S. used to cover certain always strong privacy laws in Germany, and the U.S. was sort of filling in behind the German intelligence. And a lot of those things which ended up touching and paying playing a role in the attack that did happen, they kind of put together and put this scenario together. And so it’s alarming.”