Mind sweepers: welcome to the age of introspective TV

From Cary Fukunaga’s Maniac to Julia Roberts’ new Amazon show Homecoming, television is having an introspective moment, exploring its darkest subject yet – the human brain

In an early episode of the Julia Roberts show Homecoming, a soldier is brought back from Afghanistan to live in a rehabilitation centre in Florida, where he will learn to reintegrate into civilian life. At dinner in the hall, he begins to question the food on the plate in front of him. The pineapple cobbler the men are served every night is “really laying it on thick”, he announces, served to make them believe they are in Florida. But how do they know where they really are? Could they leave the facility, from which they are supposedly free to go, to have a beer in a local bar? Are we watching a soldier grapple with PTSD, or are his questions about his reality actually pointing towards the series’ central mystery, tantalisingly about to unravel?

In Homecoming, Roberts stars as Heidi Bergman, a case worker at the facility. When we meet her four years later, she seems not to remember much at all about her work there. There is layer on layer of uncertainty and unreliability, a sense that the floor is shifting underneath us. That suits Sam Esmail, the creator and director of the series, just fine. He created the similarly perception-bending Mr Robot. “I never consciously made the choice when I wrote Mr Robot or signed on to Homecoming,” he says, over the phone from Los Angeles, “but what ties those projects together is something that resonated with me about our relationship with reality, and whether we can trust it, or not.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Bxgmdv
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