‘Homeland’ Showrunner On How Trump Influenced Season 7: “Some Of The Stuff That’s Going On Is Quite Scary”

Since so much pop culture pulls from politics, the current administration has had a massive ripple effect on every show set in or around the White House. HBO’s Veep spent most of its most recent season out of the White House, thus avoiding any comparisons, but Showtime’s Homeland is going all in.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Alex Gansa revealed just how much Trump’s white House and foreign policy has impacted the upcoming penultimate seventh season.

Before every season of the show goes into production, the staff takes a trip to Washington, D.C. to meet with intelligence agency insiders to get the lowdown on actual terror threats and insight into how the real agencies operate. What Gansa and his team learned, however, is that real life is way scarier than anything they initially thought to include in Season 7.

“There are intelligence officers we met in D.C. who say what they do every morning is wake up and check their phones to make sure Seoul, South Korea, is still there,” said Gansa. “When you’re facing that kind of uncertainty it’s difficult to parallel in our Homeland world. It felt much scarier in real life than what we were writing. It’s the situation the country finds itself in and as storytellers what we find ourselves in.”

The new season sees Claire Danes’ ex-CIA officer attempting to take down the president (Elizabeth Marvel) now that she’s focused all of her energy on revenge following an assassination attempt. The fact that the show now includes a major presidential plot makes what’s happening as intelligence agencies deal with Trump feel relevant to what they’re doing on Homeland.

“We’re telling a bit of a parallel story to what’s happening in the real world,” says Gansa. “Obviously the Trump administration is a little embattled and a little isolated and facing their own difficulties with the national security establishment and what they call ‘the deep state.’ Our administration, the Keene administration, is facing much the same issues but from the reverse — Trump is a conservative administration, Keene is more liberal administration, but a lot of the issues are the same. There’s a degree of paranoia inside the Oval Office.”

Still, there are some IRL events that the show just won’t go near. “Frankly, some of the stuff that’s going on is quite scary — we don’t address North Korea, for example.”

Homeland returns to Showtime on February 11.

Where to stream Homeland