"Homecoming" follows Heidi Bergman (Roberts), who works as a counselor for the Homecoming program, which helps to transition returning soldiers back into civilian life. It also follows Bergman some years later, living with her mother and working as a waitress. She's approached by a Department of Defense auditor, Thomas Carrasco (Shea Whigham), who is investigating Homecoming and a complaint involving one of the soldiers in the program, Walter Cruz (Stephan James). What happened at Homecoming and how much did Heidi know? And where is Walter? Other characters include Heidi's boss at Homecoming, Colin Belfast (Cannavale), Heidi's mother Ellen (Spacek), Walter's mother Gloria (Jean-Baptiste) and Audrey (Hong Chau), the receptionist at Homecoming's sinister parent company, Geist.
When you look at "Homecoming" from a narrative level, it's actually quite straightforward and the answers are all telegraphed far in advance. However, it's the presentation that turns it into a wonderful exercise in suspense. Esmail takes his cues from the political thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s, and the series is full of slow zooms and pans, ominous music (often taken from other existing soundtracks), and god's-eye overhead shots. There's a calculated exactness to the art direction and the cinematography that summons up gobs of Kubrickian menace. The Homecoming center in Heidi's past is being painstaking marketed as a helpful, positive experience, and all the while you know there's shady business going on. The show never hides this, but the stresses that the secrecy puts on everyone involved in the conspiracy leads to a wonderfully uneasy, paranoid atmosphere.
I like how purposefully the show's structure is used in the storytelling. Half-hour dramas are fairly rare, and Esmail uses that to his advantage. Each episode ends with a long shot, sometimes of a character doing something mundane, or simply lingering on picturesque scenery as the credits start rolling out. This gives viewers a minute or two at the end of the episode to reflect and absorb what just happened, and sometimes to amplify feelings of disturbance or resignation. Often episodes left me wanting more, and more likely to want to keep going on to the next episode. I expect most viewers will watch several installments together the way that I did on Amazon Prime. There's also an after credits sequence after the finale, my favorite of the year, that nicely sets up a second season.
The performances contribute significantly to the show's effectiveness. Julia Roberts is engaging as Heidi, deftly keeping the audience in the dark as to what she knows at certain points in the story, and what her motivations are. However, it's Bobby Cannavale as her awful, blowhard boss who is my favorite of the cast. He's over-the-top-terrible, but also clearly vulnerable in the face of far scarier corporate forces at Geist. When he gets trapped in the snares of his own making, it's so much fun to watch him squirm. Stephan James' Walter is the one totally guileless player in the whole affair, and he's such a charismatic, likeable presence. Several of the smaller supporting turns are also excellent, but saying too much about them would be treading in spoiler territory.
I'm curious about the podcast version of "Homecoming," which features an entirely different but equally impressive cast of actors However, without Sam Esmail's contributions, I don't think it would have the same appeal for me. There are plenty of conspiracy shows out there, including Esmail's "Mr. Robot," but few that have achieved the same level of stylish cinematic entertainment. There are a few great moments in "Homecoming" that took me completely by surprise in the best way, even though I knew they were coming. And that's a hard thing to achieve.
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