The lowdown on sixth season of 'Homeland'

BEVERLY HILLS — After five globe-trotting seasons shot in South Africa, Berlin, Israel, Morocco and Charlotte, N.C. (a stand-in for suburban Washington), Homeland is shifting its focus to New York City for a sixth season due Jan. 15.

At the Television Critics Association press tour Thursday, star Claire Danes said "there is something very heartening and lovely about getting to produce it on our own home turf" of New York —a city she and co-star Mandy Patinkin call home. Production starts next week on the new season, delayed from its customary fall premiere.

Danes' Carrie Mathison, a bipolar former CIA agent, stopped a terrorist attack in Berlin at the end of last season, which saw agent Quinn (Rupert Friend) suffer a stroke.

The action picks up a few months later, with Carrie now living in Brooklyn and working at a foundation that helps American Muslims. New episodes tackle "the effects of a U.S. presidential election," with the season set entirely in the weeks between it and Inauguration Day during a "fragile transfer of power," Showtime says.

What to expect from your favorite TV shows this season

The winner, a junior senator from New York played by Elizabeth Marvel, is "a little bit Hillary, a little bit Donald Trump, a little bit Bernie Sanders. Anything can happen," said executive producer Alex Gansa, who answered one lingering mystery.

"Quinn is alive," he said. "We just want to be careful about explaining his condition; you're going to see a very changed and altered Quinn," who represents "a familiar casualty of the war on terror."

New story lines in the always topical series concern "law enforcement's relationship with the Muslim community," Gansa says, and the intelligence community's role in educating the new president on terrorist threats.  Carrie is still outside the CIA, so "the question is, when she's going to get back in, if ever."

Danes says Carrie has "repositioned herself" to "effect change from a different vantage point" while "rewriting the rules in her own head...Last season she was in a place of atonement, and she was wrestling with enormous guilt with making the choices she made, which resulted in the death of so many people. She's also experimenting with cultivating happiness in her life ... but it doesn't work. She isn't really designed for it. She learned that maybe she had this calling, which is big and demanding."

Showtime answered an open question about the future of Homeland: The Emmy-winning series has been renewed for two additional seasons, due in 2018 and 2019. Does that mean Gansa has an idea for how it will all end? "I wish." But his dream is to end the series in Israel, where it all began in the pilot episode and where the Israeli series that inspired Homeland was set.