An easy peasy plot to follow.

JUST how much time do these TV people think we have to spare? At 01''' least the UK keeps its series short, but you can lose yourself in American shows for days. If you choose the wrong thing - which I invariably do - you waste precious hours of life. At least one series of Lost, everything after the first season of Heroes, and, in retrospect, almost all of True Blood, is time I'll never get back.

It's the telly you haven't watched that defines your tastes, if anything.

I still haven't seen a single one of these wonderful Danish dramas with the knitted characters. No Mad Men either - I tried, but the pace is too glacial and there's not enough violence. And no Sky - meaning no Game Of Thrones, no Boardwalk Empire - that's just a relief.

Which leads me to Homeland. Now, terrorists, bombs and men in suits striding about purposefully don't really float my TV boat.

This is a slightly more serious version of 24, and I didn't bother with that either. But everyone says it's brilliant. Have I been missing out? You can't pick up these things halfway through. Can you? Are these shows really so dense, so complex? In Homeland's case, no. I put the must-watch-from-the-beginning theory to the test by sticking on the penultimate episode last night. Dense and complex, my foot. It was easy peasy.

They're after some terrorists called Walker and Abu Nazir. That's the plot. Simple. Damian Lewis is carrying a bomb around with him, seemingly having turned to the dark side during a tour of Iraq, and his daughter's starting to suss out that her dad's gone a bit weird.

Homeland also stars the hypnotic Mandy Patinkin, last seen furrowing his troubled brow in Criminal Minds. He's as haunted as ever, now with the added gravitas of a scholarly beard. (For the uninitiated, Mandy is a man.) And Claire Danes is considerably less sweet here than she was with Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet, over-acting her way through a bipolar episode which seems to make her alliterate all of her gabbled sentences.

"He's just a part, a piece, a pixel, a pawn of no importance!" she pants. "His movements are methodical, meaningful and monstrous! You can identify the impetus, the incident, the injury!" It ended with her shrieking "You don't know what you're doing!" I have to admit it was quite exciting. I'll watch the finale, and maybe the rest too. In what order, I haven't decided yet.

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