Howard Gordon writes thrillers built on one doubt held as long as it will bear: is this man what he says he is. Fresh, as in Homeland's first season, few in television do it better. Once the doubt is spent, so is he.
Fi1m perspective
A man comes home from a war and says very little, and a woman with no proof watches him anyway. That is the first hour of Homeland (2011), and it is the shape Howard Gordon keeps returning to. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) is flown back from captivity to a hero's welcome; Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has no evidence, no permission and a diagnosis she is hiding, and she cannot stop looking. Fourteen years later, The Beast in Me (2025) sits Claire Danes across from Matthew Rhys and asks the same question about him.
Gordon has been asking it for a long time. He began in the mid-1980s writing with Alex Gansa on Spenser: For Hire and Beauty and the Beast, joined The X-Files in 1994 as supervising producer and writer, and left in 1997 having written through the programme's formative seasons. He co-wrote an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, wrote for Angel, then joined 24 from its first season and ran it from 2006 to 2010, with the clock running in real time. Homeland is what he and Gansa made afterwards, working from Gideon Raff's Israeli series Prisoners of War, when they wanted to ask whether the man with the gun might be wrong.
That first season is as good as any spy thriller television has made, and we say so having sat through scenes of Brody doing nothing at all with our shoulders up round our ears. Gordon and Gansa put the doubt in our heads in the pilot and then refused to settle it, so a returned soldier in his own house became something we could not watch calmly. Danes and Lewis did the rest. It is the best work of Gordon's career and we would send anyone to it.
The trouble is what comes after the first question. Homeland ran to eight seasons and 96 episodes and had said its piece by the end of the third. 24 lost its footing in its sixth season after early arcs that held together. The Beast in Me, written with Gabe Rotter and Daniel Pearle, keeps Danes and Rhys circling each other well after the writing has run short of things to say. The method in each case is the same: suspicion is renewed rather than deepened, a new reason to distrust the man arriving on schedule while the woman watching him is given less and less to do. The Beast in Me has the material for something disquieting about why another person's notoriety becomes so absorbing, and it is too hesitant to follow that anywhere uncomfortable.
Gordon once wrote, "I hate writing. I really do." On the evidence, he minds the end of a season more than the start of one. Begin Homeland, keep going to the third season, and stop while you still care what the answer is.
Biography
Howard Gordon is an American television writer and producer. He was born on 31 March 1961 in Queens, New York City. He graduated from Princeton University in 1984 and began his career in Los Angeles with writing partner Alex Gansa, starting with freelance work on Spenser: For Hire before joining the staff of Beauty and the Beast.
Gordon is known for his work on The X-Files (1993), 24 (2001), for which he served as executive producer and writer, and Homeland (2011), which he co-developed with Alex Gansa and Gideon Raff. He also co-developed Tyrant and Accused, produced Awake, and served as showrunner and writer on The Beast in Me (2025). He has received multiple Emmy Awards, including for Outstanding Drama Series for 24 and Homeland, and for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for the Homeland pilot.
