Do we deserve the TV we get?

In today's Season 4 premiere of one of my favourite shows, Homeland, the CIA director tells Carrie Mathison he can't see why she wants to return to Islamabad where the station chief has just been stomped all over by an enraged crowd, as revenge for an attack killing 40 innocent civilians, part of a wedding party of a wanted terrorist.

"It's not even a real country," he says. "It's a shithole, a ****ing acronym." Music to the ears of our televangelists who ask for the blood of Pakistanis every night there is a border violation.

But my point is different. Here is a TV show, a popular TV show, with a bipolar CIA agent as its heroine, who abandons her baby almost as soon as she is born, to fight for her country. This is a war by other means, of assets and counter assets, of drone strikes and actionable intel, of stealth strikes and double agents.

This is a show that captures the zeitgeist of Barack Obama's America, a nation ambivalent about the costs of war abroad. As one time acting CIA chief and Carrie's mentor Saul Berenson says, America has been in Afghanistan for 12 years and never had a long term vision. It's not fought a 12 year war but 12 one-year wars.

As always Homeland echoes the stories of the time. The killing of the CIA station chief echoes the Raymond Allan Davis case, where the CIA acting station chief was extradited although he had killed three people. Last season ended with hope of talks between Iran and America, echoing the thawing in relations between the two nations last year.

[Spoiler alert]

The price: poor, dear Brody, who was made to hang in a public square for his crimes.

This season, as America contemplates the deadly threat of ISIS, it goes back to its favourite topic: who is right and who is wrong in the war on terror. The theatre is Pakistan and Afghanistan (and again tele-nationalists and social media extremists will be happy to know that most of the Pakistanis are played by Indian actors, including our very own Pi, Suraj Sharma).

So the point is, America makes smart, politically compelling television (other examples abound - The Newsroom, The Blacklist, and Scandal) and we make Bigg Boss and Comedy Nights with Kapil. We have to watch Arya Babbar dance to I am a disco dancer and Karishma Tanna smear spice all over someone called Gaurav.

And then of course, we have to listen to Kapil Sharma's inane jokes and watch the nation's biggest stars pay homage to him hoping he will get them Rs 100 crore box office earnings.

Is it fair? Can't we exchange Kapil Sharma on OLX for Carrie Mathison?