Amazon released all 10 episodes of its newest mystery drama, Homecoming which was inspired by the scripted podcast created by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg. The two have now brought this show on the popular streaming service and the word is out – it is good.
Heidi Bergman (Julia Roberts) is a therapist who treats soldiers facing PTSD. She is set up in a Tampa facility where one of her patients, Walter Cruz (Stephan James) visits her to talk about the friends he had lost overseas. It is a thrilling TV series full of twists and dark discoveries.
One story in particular that Walter tells Heidi about is a prank played on one of his fellow soldiers Benji who is a huge fan of the movie, Titanic. He had become so obsessed with the James Cameron movie that he watched it every night before going to bed.
“We were trying to paint a picture of Walter’s life on this base when he was deployed and what was going on a bit,” Homecoming co-creator Micah Bloomberg tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We wanted to have them do kind of a practical joke, and then I was thinking a fake movie because maybe it would be hard to see movies [during deployment] or something like that. And then, the thing I remember thinking was, if this is going to be funny, it needs to be a movie that everybody knows.”
Another soldier on the ship, Lesky, told Benji that there is a sequel to Titanic called Titanic Rising. “That’s what is funny about it,” says Bloomberg, “because you’re like, ‘Why would there be a Titanic 2 that you hadn’t heard of?’ What’s funny is that you isolate these people, you get them alone, and you get this person to believe it.”
Walter later tells Heidi that Lesky, the man behind the prank, had died later in the battle. “It kind of captures the way this is almost trying to be two separate things at once,” adds co-creator Eli Horowitz. “It is this character drama, even a comedy in certain ways, and then it’s also this plot-driven psychological thriller. And there’s almost two full ways of seeing the whole series. What we like most is when things crossover between those two genres.”
You can watch all 10 episodes of this psychological thriller now on Amazon.