Homeland - Mondays. Final season starts Sun 16th Feb on Ch4.

For the current version of Homeland, action scenes rapidly intercut with political ruthlessness look to be exactly what the show needs to sustain its worthiness.

The Bottom Line: The series is back in leaner, smarter, more action-packed form

New characters open up intriguing new avenues to investigate Carrie's ability to operate effectively. 3 out of 4 stars

The intense serialization of contemporary TV is generally celebrated as a good thing. The intricacy and depth possible only through long-form storytelling is perhaps the greatest advantage television has over other forms of entertainment, a key reason you read articles like this, and why I’m paid to write them. Yet watching Homeland attempt to take flight in its fourth season, only to be dragged down by the heavy albatross of the past three, makes me wish there were a different way.

Meet the new, improved “Homeland.” After two disappointing seasons, the Showtime series’ dramatic culmination of its original story has shifted the focus squarely onto Claire Danes’ complex CIA operative, and simultaneously allowed the producers to shed more irritating elements (see Brody, Dana). What emerges, then, in a two-episode premiere and subsequent hour is a show that lacks the initial kick the program delivered, but plays like a smart, spare thriller — “24,” without the James Bond-style super-heroics. “Homeland” might never be a truly great series again, but if it stays on this path it will be an eminently watchable one.

All the silly family drama has finally taken a back seat to the CIA wheeling-and-dealing that made the show so damn scintillating in the first place. I’m as surprised as anyone, ladies and gents, but Homeland is back.

The first three hours of the new season that Showtime made available for review suggest “Homeland” is up for new challenges that move the show somewhat closer in tone to “24” while still maintaining a prestige sheen that it’s smarter, less formulaic and more believable than the Fox terrorism drama.

Why, after all that transpired, would you let such a series back into your life? Season 4 of Homeland appears to be genuinely engaged with this question. It seems humbled, implicitly apologetic about the mistakes that came before. The result is a series shorn of many of its complications, some of its over-reaching, and much of its implausibility. It is still psychologically astute, but it has become a much more straightforward, and largely effective, spy show. If you do not want to let Homeland back into your heart, that’s understandable. But maybe let it crash on your couch for a probationary period.

"Homeland" appears to be aging backward; it started out as a mature tale employing a sophisticated arsenal of dramatic strategies, but it has gotten more adolescent over time. Another way to sum up the evolution of "Homeland" from Season 1 to Season 4 is to say that it used to approach characterization with a scalpel, but over time, it began using a hammer instead.

It's an even greater relief, then, to report that, based on the first two episodes of "Homeland" Season 4 -– which premieres Sunday, Oct. 5, with both episodes airing back-to-back in a two-hour block – Brody is still dead. And "Homeland" shows signs of coming back to creative life.

It's still good. It's still interesting. It's still, intermittently, vital. But it's no longer brilliant, and the gap between that and what it is now is even more frustrating than if it had just become utterly terrible.

And now here we are in season four, at the point when I was ready to give up on Homeland, and wouldn't you know it: It's good again. Not great, but good: smarter than you expect, more patient with its storytelling, less interested in the characters' plotting and counter-plotting than in their often miserable inner lives.

Homeland's fourth season feels as fresh, important and relevant as yesterday's news--or tomorrow's news. A bracing, intelligent start.

As Carrie ruthlessly, recklessly pursues answers to how they got into this mess, at peace only when she's at war, Homeland regains much of its dramatic power by taking us far from home and making us wonder that if someone like Carrie is our best hope, should we just abandon hope?

The series has some work to do to extricate its characters from the hole it dug in season 3.

You'll still need to suspend disbelief to accept her as someone the CIA could trust again, much less as anonymous enough for clandestine work. But if you can make the leap, it looks as if the post-Brody world still has stories worth telling.