‘Homeland’ Casts Female President

Showtime’s popular political thriller Homeland will feature a female president-elect when the show returns next year for its sixth season.

Actress Elizabeth Marvel (House of Cards) has been cast to play president-elect Elizabeth Keeners in the show’s Washington D.C.-focused forthcoming season.

Showtime took to Twitter Wednesday and confirmed the news.

NEW INTEL: Elizabeth Marvel to play #Homeland President-Elect Elizabeth Keane. Season 6 production starts Aug in NY! pic.twitter.com/ck9VAoR36B

— Homeland (@SHO_Homeland) July 27, 2016

Last month, in an in-depth Q&A moderated by Vanity Fair‘s James Walcott, Homeland star Claire Danes and the show’s executive producer-director Lesli Linka Glatter broke the news about the show’s new female commander-in-chief. The pair noted then that their female president would not be a carbon copy of Hillary Clinton, but rather “a composite of all the different candidates.”

Glatter and Danes’ initial announcement came on the same day that Hillary Clinton crossed the delegate threshold to become the Democratic party’s 2016 presidential nominee, and the first woman ever to be nominated for president by a major political party.

Wednesday’s report from THR confirming the news came just hours after Clinton’s coronation kicked off at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Homeland’s female president isn’t exactly a first for network or cable TV.

HBO’s current Emmy-winning show Veep features Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing U.S. President Selina Meyer. In the past, shows like NBC’s State of Affairs, FOX’s 24 and Prison Break, and ABC’s short-lived Commander in Chief have all cast woman to take on the role of a female U.S. president.

However, the move from Showtime does lend credence to a new report from Media Research Center’s NewsBusters that meticulously details how Hollywood films and television shows have spent decades subtly preparing American audiences for an inevitable Hillary Clinton presidency.

Homeland routinely tackles timely geopolitical issues in its storylines, whether it tries to or not; Season 5 of the popular series was filmed in Berlin and centered on a looming threat from the terrorist group ISIS.

Nevertheless, showrunner Alex Gansa said in December that it is not the show’s intention to take a stand one way or another on political issues.

“Homeland tries not to do that,” Gansa told Entertainment Weekly. “We try to pose questions, not posit answers.”

Season 6 of Homeland premieres in January 2017.

 

Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson