Terror TV: homeland shows the messier side of the security bureaucracy.

• Author: Suderman, Peter

LESS THAN two months after the 9/11 attacks masterminded by Osama bin Laden, the war on terror came to prime time. The vehicle was 24, a grim, often gleefully violent show starring a gung-ho American counter-terrorism agent working to stop a series of spectacular terror plots--the follow-up attacks that many expected but never came.

Set in real time, with each season taking place over the course of a single day, 24 affirmed America's worst fears about terrorism--that massive, coordinated attack plans were numerous and perpetually imminent--while simultaneously attempting to reassure viewers that super-powered security agents with godlike surveillance capabilities would ultimately prevail against any threat, stopping at nothing to do so.

A decade later, 24's hero, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) is the war on terror's best known pop-culture icon. But as the show wore on, its relevance declined along with public enthusiasm for both the war and the two overseas conflicts it produced.

Two of that show's executive producers, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, are playing catch-up with Homeland, a series that premiered on Showtime in October. It patrols much of the same turf as 24 but from a decidedly more skeptical perspective.

Like 24, the show is a terrorism thriller that chronicles a high-stakes hunt for an elusive terrorist mastermind believed to be planning an attack. But while 24 captured the Bush-era zeal for revenge with a combination of vicarious, violent thrills and absolute moral certainty, Homeland offers a less enthusiastic, more ambiguous picture of an uncertain campaign against an uncertain enemy--and a security infrastructure that is often more invasive than effective.

Much of the difference boils down to self-confidence. 24 came off as brash and self-certain, taking as a given that the surveillance state was a powerful, effective, and necessary tool for fighting terror. That confidence frequently extended to the technology itself-the assorted networks of computers and satellites and spy gadgets--which it tended to portray with worshipful awe. In the world of 24, nowhere and no one were safe from the government's eyes in the sky.

Nor were they safe from Jack Bauer, the show's hyper-competent lead agent. Bauer was a sort of Americanized, post-9/11 update on James Bond, brutal and remorseless (his main claim to fame was his affinity for creative torture) rather than cool and suave. Like Bond, Bauer was effectively a superhero, invincible...