Homeland

Homeland's first season is one of the most gripping debut seasons in television history. Claire Danes's Carrie Mathison — a bipolar CIA analyst convinced that a rescued American POW has been turned by al-Qaeda — is a protagonist unlike anything television had seen: brilliant, unstable, right about everything, and impossible to trust. Damian Lewis's Nicholas Brody is her perfect counterpart, a man whose loyalties are genuinely unknowable. The show captured post-9/11 America's paranoia with more nuance than any film or series of its era. Later seasons varied in quality, but the Brody arc across the first three seasons is a masterpiece of sustained ambiguity and tension.