Homeland

Showtime, Sundays, 9 p.m.

Fans of this Emmy-winning series who in season three overdosed on the Carrie Mathison-Nicholas Brody roundelay may want to give the rebooted fourth season a chance, now that Brody is gone. The profoundly unbalanced Carrie (she’s bipolar), brilliantly played by Claire Danes, will continue to confound viewers who can’t picture her as a CIA station chief, much less in a city as crucial and dangerous as Kabul, but so be it. Danes pulls us in, and the series goes back to doing what it does best, dramatizing the life of spies and other CIA operatives in today’s Middle East. The season opens with “The Drone Queen,” in which faulty intel leads Mathison to authorize a drone strike that kills 40 people in a wedding party. A video of the party is uploaded to YouTube, causing a diplomatic shitstorm. In the second episode, “Trylon and Perisphere,” Carrie is called back to Washington, D.C., where we see her freak out at the reality of the child she had with Brody. She’s better at bombing than taking care of her own baby, it seems. But that’s Homeland for you, a mad world filled with mad people, a window on the lunacy that rules in the Middle East.