'Homeland's' Hot Streak

6:00 AM PDT 10/2/2012 by Lacey Rose

From one-time SAT tutors to creators of Showtime's Emmy-sweeping smash, Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon open up their set, writer's room and the improbably touching story behind their 30-year friendship.

In the fall of 1984, Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon packed up Gordon's Datsun B-210 and drove from New York to Los Angeles to "make it" as writing partners. Having met a year earlier at Princeton, the two men moved in together in Santa Monica, launched an SAT prep company to support themselves and caught their first break on ABC's detective series Spenser: For Hire.