While speaking with Howard Stern on his Sirius XM show several months ago, Homeland star Claire Danes said that the upcoming eighth season of the Showtime series would be its last, and now, Showtime's CEO David Nevins confirmed the news while speaking at the Television Critics Association press-tour.
"Homeland has been a game-changing series for SHOWTIME, as provocative about the world we live in as it is prescient," Nevins said. "This project, arriving right at the beginning of my Showtime tenure thanks to [producers] Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, and brought to life by a remarkable cast led by Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin, is a richly written character study that is now ready for its natural conclusion. Viewers will be rewarded by the way Alex brings Homeland home." Showrunner Alex Gansa had already said that the eighth season would be it for him as well, and told reporters at the TCA that "Homeland has been the most joyful and rewarding experience of my career. Not many have been as lucky as me — partnered with the miraculous Claire Danes, supported to the ends of the earth by Fox and Showtime, and working in the company of some of the most gifted writers, actors, and filmmakers in the business. I am sad to see the journey coming to an end, but it is time." There had been talk of the possibility of Homeland continuing with a new cast and show-runner, but it seems that Showtime has finally decided to end the series on their own terms.
While speaking with Entertainment Weekly back in April, Alex Gansa teased that some major changes will be coming for the final season which will bring the series back to its roots with a self-contained story-line.
[Season 7 arranges] all the pieces on the chessboard to make that a proper finale for the story we’ve been telling. We get to play this last season in D.C with the intention of taking us overseas for one last chapter. Season 8 will be overseas somewhere. We get to play a story with larger national stakes in season 7 and we’ll go back to a smaller intelligence-based season in 8. We get to pull out all the stops this year and then get to the emotional heart of things in season 8. We’re going to start fresh in season 8 and probably do a fairly big time jump between 7 and 8 and put any Trump parallels behind us. We’ll tell a very contained story, hopefully in Israel.
Well, how do you feel about Homeland officially coming to an end?