The Wall Street Journal has an lengthy article about the efforts of the producers and writers of 24 to remake the show after the end of last season:
Against the real-life backdrop of global terrorist attacks, “24″ at its peak fulfilled the fantasies of an insecure nation. It became one of the most important franchises for News Corp.’s Fox Broadcasting Co., with 17 million viewers tuning in some weeks and millions returning to watch on DVD. (News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.)
But those who ride the tide of the times can also get upended by them. As public opinion about the Iraq War turned south, the show’s depiction of torture came to be seen as glorifying the practice in the wake of real-world reports of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques used on detainees.
Ratings dropped by a third over the course of last year’s sixth season. Producers would later experience trouble casting roles, once some of the most desirable in television, because the actors disapproved of the show’s depiction of torture. “The fear and wish-fulfillment the show represented after 9/11 ended up boomeranging against us,” says the show’s head writer, Howard Gordon. “We were suddenly facing a blowback from current events.”
Last spring, Fox executives asked producers to come up with a plan for what to do with their onetime crown jewel. The producers decided to take the radical — and rarely attempted — step of reinventing the show. While some fans complained “24″ had grown too formulaic, the producers also grudgingly saw the importance of wrestling the show from its ties to an unpopular conflict.
The result: “24″ is nowhere to be found on the TV schedule. For weeks the show’s producers tried to reconcile the show’s premise with the new public mood. Should Jack atone for his sins? Is Jack bad? The script rewrites and philosophical crises left the show so far behind schedule that when the Hollywood writers went on strike in November, Fox had no choice but to delay its premiere date. The show could premiere this summer, next fall or as late as January 2009.
In some sense, I think that the article’s attempt to tie the popularity of 24 into public attitudes about the Iraq War and the War on Terror goes a little overboard, an analogy which I criticized a year ago:
Like conservatives who think that the success of 24 is somehow a referendum on the War on Terror, this person just doesn’t get it either. Like all good television, 24 is about the drama in the lives of the characters. If viewers hadn’t come to like David Palmer so much, his death at the beginning of Season Five would have been meaningless. Instead, over four years, we saw him grow as a character and we saw his relationship with Bauer become one of the central elements of the show.
If you really want to understand what 24 is all about, you need to go back and look at the first season. Jack was a different guy back then. A federal agent willing to take chances, yes, but more importantly a man willing to do anything to save and protect his family — which was the one weakness his enemy that day was able to exploit. Jack has became more ruthless over the years, but it’s clear that’s only because of what has happened to the people around him and what he’s been forced to do.
In other words, the show isn’t about terrorism and violence, it’s about how the characters, and more specifically one character, have reacted to the terrorism and violence around them and what it’s forced them to become.
If you don’t get that, then you don’t know Jack.
In that sense, the direction in which the show appears to be heading in Season Seven, whenever that finally gets off the ground, is entirely consistent with what the show has really been all about to begin with.
