‘Homeland’ Too PC?

Television producer Howard Gordon earned the wrath of liberals with “24,” the Fox smash about an American counterterrorist agent who stopped at nothing to save lives.

Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer would torture his own grandma if she held a clue about a terrorist attack, sending hand-wringing viewers into convulsions. In many ways it was television’s most subversive program.

Gordon’s “Homeland” is another matter.

The show’s co-creator and executive producer has fashioned a different brand of terror drama, one that begins its fifth season at 9 p.m. Eastern Sunday on Showtime.

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Gordon told The Daily Beast back in 2011 that the series wanted to “as much as possible, decouple the association between terrorism and Islam.” The much ballyhooed first season featured an American who became radicalized, in part, after a Muslim child he had grown very attached to was killed by U.S. bombing.

Yet the series still focused on Islamic-based terror cells, a notion that many entertainment programs have avoided or soft-pedaled in recent years. For that, Salon.com dubbed the series the most “Islamophobic” show on air. The liberal site complained “Homeland” quietly supported racial profiling and the notion that radicalized Muslims are flooding America.

An opinion piece in the Washington Post dubbed the series the most “bigoted” program on air. “Since its first episode, ‘Homeland’ has churned out Islamophobic stereotypes as if its writers were getting paid by the cliché,” the piece said.

The Pakistani government similarly blasted the series last year, saying the fourth season’s storyline unfairly depicted the nation — when Osama bin Laden was found hiding — as a safe haven for terrorists. The season featured a Pakistani intelligence agent helping out terrorists.

Salon.com dubbed the series the most “Islamophobic” show on air.

What will the fifth season bring? We may have received a clue earlier this year after a deadly attack against the French publication Charlie Hebdo was sparked by its publication of the prophet Muhammad. Seventeen people were killed over a three-day period.

Showtime President David Nevins suggested shortly after the killings that “Homeland” might avoid radical Islamic terrorists as the villain for season five, a first for the series. Nevins cited creative reasons for the possibility.

“I hope (the attacks are) not considered at all,” Nevins said, according to Entertainment Weekly. “I really, really don’t want there to be any limitations. I don’t expect there will be. They never shied away from anything difficult. I want them to go right into the teeth of it again.”

Related: Will Refugees Bring Terror?

Our first glimpses of the show’s new season reveal an emphasis on spying, not bombs. The story picks up with Carrie (Claire Danes) living away from the CIA pressure cooker at long last. She’s in a new, happy relationship and working as a security expert for a German businessman. It’s a far cry from her tumultuous past.

Naturally, Carrie’s sense of calm won’t last. The season kicks off with references to WikiLeaks-style data spills, government eavesdropping on citizens and, later, ISIS.

Will punches be pulled over U.S. foreign policy plays? Consider this quote from the trailer, spoken by the businessman who employs Carrie: “Nothing has made the world more dangerous in the last 15 years than the foreign policy of the United States.”

“Right into the teeth,” indeed.