Top Five 24 Ingredients
As we say goodbye to 24, the time has come to list what has been great about this show. Its eight-year run has been uneven, but the legacy is still impressive and these are the reasons why we shouldn’t forget its place in television history:
- The cinematic quality: They say 24 was a TV show. Funny, that’s not really how I see it. The fact that they’re bringing the concept to the silver screen is no surprise. To those of us who grew up with the likes of Die Hard (1988), 24 has been an obvious equivalent with production values so high that one hardly thought of this as a TV show. The action (including shootouts, explosions and car chases) often looked as exciting and breakneck as they do in theaters (but without the epileptic seizures Michael Bay prefers to call directing and editing). Look at that Fox trailer above. Does that look like television to you?
- Kiefer Sutherland: When 24 premiered in 2001, Kiefer Sutherland was a washed-up former star of movies that appealed to teen audiences back in the 1980s. After a string of video releases, salvation came in the form of Jack Bauer, a tough agent working for a government agency called CTU. Over the years, Bauer would turn into an unstoppable machine, but the role provided plenty of challenges for Sutherland who went on to win an Emmy for it… and see his movie career revived. The clip shows Sutherland talking about the nine years he spent on the show.
- The fifth season: Not all 24 fans will agree with me when I say that season 5 was the best. Some of them prefer the first one, but the fifth elevated the drama. It began with everybody assuming that Bauer was dead, except his closest friends who knew better. When some of them were murdered, Jack was forced to resurface and fight another bunch of terrorists… who turned out to have ties within the U.S. government. Thrilling as always, this season benefited immensely from the nerve-wrenching, Bergman-esque game played between President Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin) and the First Lady (Jean Smart). The season was so intense and well-written that it scooped an Outstanding Drama Series Emmy. The clip above shows a trailer for it.
- The presidents: The U.S. presidency has always played a key role in 24, with a succession of commanders-in-chief throughout the years. Their part has been two-folded, meaning they were subjected to both a crisis and Jack Bauer, and expected to deal with these problems. The showrunners created presidents that were saints, devils and something in-between. The ultimate good guy was the first black U.S. president, David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), a man who might have played a small part in white America’s acceptance of Barack Obama. Unfortunately, Palmer was assassinated in 2006. There have been many other presidents on the show, but worth mentioning is the ultimate bad guy, Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin). It’s not just that he’s a traitor to his country and generally speaking a slime-ball, but he’s also a coward, a Nixonian character without a backbone who often provided some comic relief on the show, thanks to Itzin’s brilliant performance. In between these people are Presidents Wayne Palmer (David’s brother, played by D.B. Woodside) and Noah Daniels (Powers Boothe), both first-rate political players without much of a moral compass, and Allison Taylor (Cherry Jones) who faced a real moral dilemma in the last season. The clip above shows Itzin discussing his character.
- The controversy: The clip above is borrowed from Fox News where several pundits discuss 24 and Jack Bauer. The show was co-created by Joel Surnow, a conservative, and it has often been interpreted as a right-wing endorsement of torture. Created the same year as 9/11 happened, 24 has always played out in the shadow of that terror attack and its aftermath, and there have been countless scenes of torture over the years… but the showrunners have always been careful to balance things. Torture has helped Jack now and then, but it has often been misleading or generally useless (as in real life); the villains have often turned out to be more complex than just a crazy jihadist trying to get his hands on WMD. 24 is not a right-wing show, but that hasn’t stopped pundits like Glenn Beck from adopting the character as a twisted role model.
Published by Stefan Hedmark 2010-05-25 14:01
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