We’re three days away from the start of the two-night four-hour premier of Season Six of 24, and it’s looking like its going to be one hell of a season:
NEW YORK (AP) — For Jack Bauer, saving America is all in a day’s work.
But early in this new day on the Fox thriller “24,” his calling as the counter-terrorist go-to guy has clearly taken its toll.
“Tell the president I’m sorry,” Bauer sobs into his cell phone just four hours into the current daylong ordeal. “I can’t do this anymore.”
(…)
Two years have elapsed since last season’s crush of crises du jour, a day that saw Bauer (Emmy winner Kiefer Sutherland) bring down treasonous President Charles Logan — and then, in a cruel twist, get kidnapped and thrown in the hold of a China-bound tanker to face punishment for raiding a Chinese consulate.The present day finds the United States in turmoil as, moments after 6 a.m., an L.A. city bus is blown up by a suicide bomber. Thought to be the work of Islamic militants, it’s the latest in a series of bombings that have pushed Americans to the brink of hysteria.
“They’re afraid to leave their homes,” says President Wayne Palmer (younger brother of former President David Palmer), reaching out to Bauer in desperation. “They’re actually starting to turn against each other.”
The president has managed to get Jack sprung from the Chinese and returned to L.A. He needs him for a quid pro quo to stop the carnage.
It will mean (what else is new?) Bauer’s almost certain death.
“It will be a relief,” says traumatized, tormented Jack.
And, of course, everyone will focus on the terrorism aspect:
Created in a nation that no longer exists, “24″ has deftly adapted to the post-9/11 era in which it’s enfolding. When the ground shifted beneath it, “24″ shifted, too: from a series that would dramatize the unthinkable, to an all-too-thinkable vision of some day looming soon.
“24″ is a wildly idealized view of our nation’s response to the threat of terrorism on our soil, yet — even within the series’ tidy 24-hour window — it has thus far withheld easy answers and happy endings. Jack Bauer, the nation’s point man for homeland security, is valiant but steadily unraveling.
So “24″ triumphs as a series it surely never set out to be: an exceptional adventure about lowered expectations. Its message is clear: Prevailing is too much for a nation to hope for. At the end of the day, endurance will have to do.
While terrorism and the fight against it are the plot of 24, I think it’s about more than that. Keifer Sutherland and other cast members (including new cast member Rick Schroder) were on Larry King Live Tuesday night and said several interesting things:
SUTHERLAND: I also think at the heart of the show, the show really isn’t about terrorism. The show is about the interaction of these people, from season one on down the line. I’ll give you season one as an example. It wasn’t as much about the threat as the relationship that was developed between Jack Bauer and the incumbent President Palmer. It was the relationship and the threat of the relationship between me and my wife and me and my daughter. It was the threat of those characters and what was the outcome going to be and the terrorism was the scenario that was created to create this heightened sense of reality. “24″ was developed and written long before the terrible events of 9/11. So you have to understand from the writer’s perspective, this was the one way that you could create this time format and create a situation that would be so dire, that it would require people to solve something like this over a 24-hour period of time.
There was a fantastic moment — I believe it was season three or season four with Shohreh, who was a terrorist but she was also a mother. And I was more interested not in the fact that she was a terrorist, but she was caught in this terrible dilemma between what she felt responsible to her cause for and what she felt responsible to her son for. And so what I think the writers have done is they’ve used this as a phenomenal back drop to create this incredibly heightened tension between characters that are so well developed that an audience becomes attached to them.
(…)
KING: We’re back with some of the cast of “24.” Again, the season premiere of six season is Sunday and Monday, the 14th and 15th. Two hours Sunday, two hours Monday, a sensational beginning, by the way. Conservative commentator Laura Ingraham has said “24″ is as close to a national referendum on torture as we’re going to get. And because people embrace this show, it means they support using torture against terrorists.
SUTHERLAND: Again, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, is that terrorism really and this scenario was developed as a backdrop for the interaction of these characters. And the things that I think people have been relating to has been this — this is a thriller. We have a time component at the bottom, so you know that something is going to happen. There is a threat. And — the threat is towards these characters that you have become involved with, that you care about. There hasn’t been a torture sequence that my character has been involved with that there isn’t some kind of a negative repercussion, whether it’s emotional. It’s very simplistic to try and take what we are doing in this fantasy, in this “24,” which is a television show and try and say that this is a referendum for torture or we are justifying the absolution of due process or anything like that.
The reason 24 is a good drama isn’t because of any political agenda, it’s because the writers have created characters that people care about and basically put them through five, soon to be six, days of hell.
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