‘Homeland’ Showrunner Teases No ‘Trump Parallels’ in Final Season

“We’re going to start fresh in Season 8 and probably do a fairly big time jump,” Alex Gansa says

Homeland Claire Danes
Antony Platt/SHOWTIME

Donald Trump may not be out of the Oval Office, but he’s on his way out of Alex Gansa’s inspiration for “Homeland” scripts.

The showrunner behind the critically-acclaimed Showtime series says that the allegories he’s been packing the drama with are out for the eighth — and most likely final — season.

“We’re going to start fresh in Season 8 and probably do a fairly big time jump between 7 and 8 and put any Trump parallels behind us,” Gansa told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published Thursday. “We’ll tell a very contained story, hopefully in Israel.”

OK, so while lead Claire Danes spilled the beans Wednesday about the eighth installment being “Homeland”s last and Showtime said in a statement to TheWrap yesterday it “has not made a decision beyond Season 8,” it looks like Gansa is operating as if it is the end.

“[Season 7 arranges] all the pieces on the chessboard to make that a proper finale for the story we’ve been telling,” Gansa told EW. “We get to play this last season in D.C with the intention of taking us overseas for one last chapter. Season 8 will be overseas somewhere. We get to play a story with larger national stakes in season 7 and we’ll go back to a smaller intelligence-based season in 8. We get to pull out all the stops this year and then get to the emotional heart of things in season 8.”

The majority of Season 6 of Gansa’s series was penned during the 2016 presidential election, which gave it a Hillary Clinton-like president in Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel). But the writers then had to deal with the shocker of Trump’s election.

That left the current Season 7, continuing the storyline in D.C. and showing Keane taking on an authoritarian role, while adding in an Alex Jones-esque conspiracy theorist character played by Jake Weber.

“Homeland” airs Sundays at 9/8c on Showtime.

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