Is ‘24′ Going Soft? Um, No…
by Guy Benson
A few weeks ago, I offered my thoughts on the new season of 24, aiming to quell concerns that the show had ‘gone soft’ in the age of Obama. The piece highlighted the contemptible pansiness of a Lefty senator (Kurtwood Smith) who was on the war path against Jack Bauer, seeking to hold him ”accountable” for his countless life-saving acts of patrioterrorism:
One of the very first scenes of the season took place on Capitol Hill, with Bauer being raked over the coals for his extreme tactics. Consider the portrayal of the senator who’s grilling Bauer just before he’s whisked away to serve an FBI subpoena. The lawmaker comes off as a sniveling know-it-all, eager to score political points by humiliating and demoralizing a man who’s repeatedly risked his life for his country. Bauer’s disdain for his inquisitor is palpable, and the audience isn’t far behind. Incidentally, inquiring minds must know: Was this character an homage to an actual sitting Senator? There are many who’d fit the bill, so let’s just call it a composite.
I argued that the holier-than-thou tone adopted by this fictional senator would turn viewers off, and that 24’s producers were subtly turning public opinion against the weak-kneed bureaucratic class in Washington.
I believe that “24’s” increased attention to interrogation regulations and suspects’ rights does not translate into a newfound enthusiasm for counterproductive caution. If anything, it’s led to the emergence of an entire class of quasi-antagonists on the show: Grandstanding senators and process-obsessed bureaucrats. While this crowd’s motives aren’t nearly as malicious as the terrorists acting in conjunction with the genocidal Senegalese regime in Africa, their actions are still seen as self-serving and risky to the well being of Americans. They’re not viewed as evil, just annoying.
*Spoilers ahead*
Lo and behold, on this week’s two-hour extravaganza, the very same liberal senator’s chief of staff was revealed to be a top enabler of a terrorist plot against the United States. Ironically, this is the same man charged with developing the federal case against Bauer on behalf of his boss. After discovering his treachery, Bauer kidnaps and tortures him (inside the White House, no less), seeking information that could disrupt the plot. Just before Bauer breaks him, the president and the senator intervene, halting the violation of a traitor’s human rights and–as it turns out–clearing the way for a hostile takeover of the White House. The cessation of Bauer’s dirty business costs more innocent lives and delivers the President of the United States into enemy hands.
Meanwhile the carping lawmaker, even after the revelation that his top advisor is a terrorist, continues to blame Bauer for almost everything. In one scene, he hisses his disapproval of Bauer’s actions through gritted teeth while being held hostage by terrorists. Terrorists, mind you, who would never have breached White House security if not for his own preachy grandstanding.
24? Going soft? Um, no.
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56 Comments
Yeah, but to me having terrorists taking over the White house as they did seems like the Evil Kineval of shark jumps. 60 sharks in one go.
It's entertaining but it's believability went out the window a while ago. They should have Kim's cougar attack the terrorists out of the blue, That would surprise people
Oh, and look, the black villains are actually being directed by evil white guys. Surprise!
I actually think our friends at "24" are making a very good effort of illustrating that sometimes, in the interest of National Security, we may have to "taser" some of the bad guys occasionally. And I hope there are real Jack Bauers who are willing to do it. They can live in my neighborhood anytime, except Jack Bauer seems to be whereever there is terrorist trouble. Maybe they can live in Sean Penn's neighborhood and just visit mine occationally.
the two hour show had some holes, but nothing i couldn't live with. the biggest gag i had was the carbon footprint commercial. nooooooooo…….
I had the same reaction as Guy. Of course '24' has tons of holes in it, but it always had. I was very concerned the show would cant "left." But I defy anyone to name another prime time drama holding up a wussy liberal senator to contempt the way "24" does
I'm sorry, Senegalese? The country in question is "Sangala" and is entirely fictional. You owe the good people of Senegal an apology!
That was one of my favorite moments as well, which spoke more to the fact that, even when faced with the blinding reality of terrorism, some people just refuse to believe it. He'd rather be "right" and dead than have to admit wrong and live.
I can't help but not like this season. I know the whole point is to contrast the effectiveness of the law abiding FBI ( no effectiveness) and the "outside the lines" Bauer and co.
But it is the very, very poor quality dialogue and ham-fisted scenes of the lady President trying to be righteous and "hard" at the same time that make the season a disaster on skates.
Et la femme FBI? Elle est tres tres mal. Oui.
"…the biggest gag i had was the carbon footprint commercial."
I had forgotten about this. In the middle of kicking terrorist ass, Jack has to give us a pantywaist global warming hysteria PSA . Disgusting and disappointing.
Come now, James! Surely you don't intend to insinuate that Agent Freckles outswimming a small motorboat or the hit team's ability to cut an access hole through reinforced concrete during a 2 minute commercial break stretch credulity in any way do you? I'm just hoping Ms. President gives Jack a chance to "interrogate" Senator Weasel. And that Chloe b#$%-slaps Agent Barfalo.
I would have given cash money for a "don't tase me, bro" out of Senator Weasel's aide de camp.
HA!
'And that Chloe…..'
Why think small? I am hoping Chloe pumps a couple full mags of 223 into Barfalo.
Chloe zapping that terrorist scumball a season or so back was the highlight of the entire series.
Jack got off a great line about the Senator being weak, and unwilling to confront evil. I thought that was as clear a ine as you could want from a tv show. The funny part of watching this show with liberal friends is how almost all of them support everything Jack does. They may oppose his practices in theory, but all support him.
I was bummed that the mole was not Garafolo. I was hoping Jack would get to torture/shoot her. Perhaps she is working for the evil white overlords rather than the evil black puppets.
I agree that Chloe pumping lead was a definite highlight (and quite a turn-on), but methinks Agent Barfalo deserves a much slower demise
I'm making a guess that the final villain of the year is a right wing extremist who's looking to keep the President from enacting liberal policy, perhaps even Powers Boothe. That's why it showed a license plate at the Juma HQ that said "…Taxation without Representation." I rewound and froze and I couldn't find the "NO" but I'm guessing that despite all of Jack's grandstanding against weak kneed Senators.
Too bad the staffer didn't scream "DONT TASE ME BRO". I was hoping Jack would taser the senator. There's a few of them types on Capital Hill who could use a good tasering.
Hole #1. The WH is stock FULL of CTVs. Even in the oval office.
Hole #2. By edict of the US Constitution, the moment POTUS is incapacitated, the VPOTUS gains power. Not an option. The moment Pres Cankles got herself locked into the saferoom incommunicado, she became a private citizen and no longer POTUS. POTUS is an office not a person. It is impossible to kidnap the President of the United States. Take a civics class, 24 writers.
Hole #1. The WH is stock FULL of CTVs. Even in the oval office.
Hole #2. By edict of the US Constitution, the moment POTUS is incapacitated, the VPOTUS gains power. Not an option. The moment Pres Cankles got herself locked into the saferoom incommunicado, she became a private citizen and no longer POTUS. POTUS is an office not a person. It is impossible to kidnap the President of the United States. Take a civics class, 24 writers.
Yes, Janis "McGreasy" Gawdawful should buy the farm at the hands of Chloe, in my opinion. The sooner, the better.
Maybe, just maybe the VP is in it up to his armpits? Who the hell knows. This show has one fault that is a plot device it is the betrayer of the moment or week. I know it is a good device to move a story along but it is over used. It is like watching Survivor on Steroids. Still love the show but would have hoped the writers could have come up with something new.
I confess that I don't really watch "24" this year. I watched about 30 minutes of the opener, but some lint needed picking from my navel… BUT I did happen to catch part of this last week's hour. When the daughter of the president insisted on tagging along to send the signal resulting in getting the secret service guy shot and then she had to feebly attempt a morse code signal… I screamed with ecstasy when the terrorist nabbed her, then became positively glued to the TV desperately hoping that the stooge terrorist would cut her annoying little eye out.
Why was there no phone available in the safe room? Why didn't Bauer knock that fool president out when she wanted to open the door? She was already impotent. I miss the black guy they had as president. Him and the kook married to an even kookier Jean Smart. Jean Smart (for me) her character is when the show jumped the great white.
Y'alls realize that 24 is _fiction_, right? As in, made up/has no connection to reality? The odds of a "Jack Bauer Moment" actually occurring (wherein torture is necessary to avert an attack minutes/seconds before that attack) are slim to none. Get a clue. 24 is outrageously fun to watch. But it's just TV.
Are you REALLY sorry? Or are you just one of THOSE guys… c'mon!
Jack: No senator, you're weak…afraid to look evil in the eye and deal with it!
That was the best quote of the season; it put the senator in his place, and it rang very true. That is the message that needs to be sent to the people that think being nice to those that hate us will just make them go away and leave us alone…they are weak, and they are afraid, so their only recourse is to demonize the people that defend them rather than standing up for them.
yes the story is fiction but it but the show displays the topic of torture, and sheds some light that everything is not always black and white.
Well, Jack Bauer can live in my neighboorhood and just go to Penn's neighborhood to taser him.
True dat re: hole #2, but then there'd be no show.
BTW, I liked the Pres Cankles comment. I lol'd a bit.
I'm disappointed in Chloe…she hasn't been nearly as condescending (especially towards Janice) as she has in the past.
If we have to deal with all of the artistic liberties (ie. LIES) that we get from people like Oliver Stone in his overrated films, then we can sure let a few slide on an action packed TV series.
Its no fun to be dead right!
The Dame President is a disgrace. Now here daughter and she will pay for her lack of cajones.
Go Jack Bauer.
You have to be a fellow Dave Barry 24 blogger….
The best thing about 24 is that it at least posits the idea that the guy the self-righteous Senator is grilling is the patriot and the Senator a weasel. If only we could get more of that on other shows. In reality, all the public ever sees, if they watch at all, is the headline-grabbing Senator whom everybody recognizes and some poor hapless slob who is being cross-examined for doing something that the public knows nothing about and never sees. The gullible public then draws the conclusion that the non-entity must be a villain. Why else would a great statesman be attacking him like that? There are plenty of Jack Bauers out there doing the necessary dirty work that most of us would not have the bravery to do. And how many of us would have the courage to risk our lives knowing that there is a substantial chance that somewhere along the line a near-traitorous elected official would be publicly humiliating us? In a suspension of disbelief way, that is the purpose a show like 24 serves.
On second thought, I think you are right! As long as it's Penn he tasers…alot! Or maybe I'll just give him a list…
Soft? A little (giving any voice to Janeane Whoreofolo is a bad thing). But more importantly, it's just horrible this season. Too many plot contrivances have strained it past the point of breaking.
I totally agree. The show's creators I think have a done a really great job remaining faithful to their characters, without being wishy washy or letting a "message" get in the way of the story. The worst part of this season, however, is the preposterousness of the plot, and plot devices.
A couple things: Having scenes take place in the white house where the suspense is whether or not the country will go to war does NOT make for good drama. The stakes aren't high– because we don't see character's we care about in danger. Showing flight attendants talk about their plans on a plane that might get blown up IS good drama, because we have something to hold onto and care about! Also, actions and motivations have to be believable and reality based for us to invest in the plot. Every person in real life has a motivation for doing something, and everyone is restricted by the same laws of nature. ** SPOILERS ** When Jeanne Garafalo's character is revealed to be a spy in the FBI; and then the list of the 100 spies is found by the head of the FBI; and the director doesn't bother to read the list to find out who the moles are; even though the entire effort of the past 5 hours has been to find the moles in the FBI– this is poor writing, and very frustrating to watch. **SPOILERS**
But very real to life. Make no mistake. We have this type of person in the White House.
Exactly. Or when the assault team of surviving secrete service guys demands proof the general has the president before they back off and when the guy says 'no' back off anyway and then they do. I mean, what? why wouldn't you insist you get proof she's alive or captured and why the h-ell wouldn't the bad guys be happy to comply in order to get what they want. I mean, from the bad guys' point of view wouldn't you WANT the cops to know you have her to show you mean business? It's crazy. You could tell the writers anticipated this was such a bad plot point that they made sure the SI guy ran his decision to back off by Moss, who of course said, 'you did the right thing' to justify the writers' move. No he didn't do the right thing. the show is rife with holes like that….but yeah, i still watch
If that idiot Senator and irritating Garafolo character die this season, it will have been a success. I didn't know you could breach White House security from the banks of the Potomac (under old tunnels no less) but it has been a few years since I was in DC.
Speaking as a liberal who enjoys 24, I'm happy to support Jack Bauer because I'm aware that it's fiction. Anyone who uses it for some kind of ideological validation has a serious hole in his life.
Why didn't Senator Red Foreman put a boot up the terrorists asses? He would have if the terrorists were Hyde, Eric, Kelso and Fez.
"24" is not something you can watch and worry about believability. That went out the window early on. The entire show is based on a never-ending chain of "single points of failure". Every preventive measure that every character runs into on the show can always be defeated through a single point of failure. In the real world, that is not how things are engineered and it most definitely is not how security is designed.
As for the original post, I agree. If anything, this season has offered up the "other side's" argument just to have Jack tell them (and show them) that they are wrong.
OK, I'll give you that, Guy. It's not going (politically) soft — except of course, for the fact it can't bring itself to make America's real enemies – ideological islamofascists – the bad buys instead of the despot of some fictional (I mean dafur) backwater African disaster zone backed by, you guessed it, an evil American Capitalist traitor — but yeah, jack's hanging tough on torture. great.
I'm not sure why I keep watching. I keep telling myself its because of TIVO — that if I had to sit through commercials on top of bad stoytelling I would never tolerate it. But the truth is I'm like a street whore and 24 is the junk. I've spent too much of my life invested in this thing. It doesn't matter that the dealer only has the crappy stuff he saves for hobos, I'm in for good. I need an intervention.
It would be easy to say the show jumped the shark this year. The truth is it jumped it half-way through season 3. This year it is the shark. Just when I thought JTS's successor, Nuking the Fridge was going to have some staying power, 24 wasted little time unseating it. So now the new JTS and KTF, is "Storming the White House." Okay, so STWH is a slightly longer acronym, but whatever.
anyway, I admit I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, that Jack realizes what he's been doing all this time is morally wrong. But people die under the watch of every other character who lives by that moral code and lives are saved with jack's methods. Period. No matter what, the writers can't spring up 3/4ths of the way through the season and give Jack an After School Special moment about torture. What would they be saying about the lives lost so far because jack wasn't allowed to act (the white house's entire secrete service staff just to name a dozen in the last episode) or, for that matter, all the lives he's saved over the last 7 years because of his actions? jack's like the McDonalds of lifesavers now — over a billion served. They just can't say 'umm sorry, we take it all back."
I'm with Ken. In watching '24' you've always had to suspend disbelief at one point or another. It doesn't take away from my enjoyment of the show, though. Kudos to Guy, too. I've never worried about '24' going soft, because time and time again, no matter what anyone else says, Jack still does what needs to be done.
Admittedly, '24' may get closer and closer to shark jumping territory with each passing season, but I'm watching it 'til the end.
I dont watch TV, so I really dont know…but didn't they nuke Los Angeles last year? And society hasn't collapsed?
And you're worried about realism? LOL
*cough* I'm just going to say this again so all you folks understand it. The show is FICTION.
Okay, you may now continue to draw 1:1 parallels to reality without question.
Given that the comments here weigh almost entirely to talking about how the always unrealistic show has "jumped the shark," "nuked the fridge," etc. it seems like you comment is one big strawman, perhaps suggestive of extreme discomfort with any fiction that doesn't operate completely within the progressive echo chamber.
Agent Renee Walker should get her own spin-off show … she kicks butt (and has a nice one herself!)
No holes at all. Not using it for ideological validation at all. We have had the discussions about whether or not they would support a Jack action under the given circumstances in the real world. They have indicated yes. Personally, I am not a big fan of indiscriminate torture. My impression of the show is that what Jack does is seldom indiscriminate and generally proportionate. My impression is that Jack is a consistently drawn character. He does not seem to have a situational ethics issue. Maybe a blind spot to a Tony type every now and again. I am aware it is fiction.
Next time try not insulting someone you disagree with.
Has it occured to the "its fiction" poster that the entire MSNBC nightly schedule is fictional ideological validation pandering to liberals? "Tingle up the leg…" , nasty sportscaster wannabe athlete wannabe male wannabe "rightious..sir"; nobody sees the acting "real"? "24" is escapist fiction but its producers say it is, which is more than MSNBC ownership does.
KDog, almost everybody at Big Hollywood does Hollywood fiction. Thank you for instructing us in our beliefs; we would not know fiction without your expertise. As to coerced information, the German Poltiezi who recently precipitated the EU court precedent defining torture were not fictional. They saved a kidnapped abused childs life in the rescue prior to which they put a vicious criminal beast through hell until he gave up the child. Our guy Jack is fictional; the debate is not.
I think she's still trying to decide whether she wants to be a real bad ass or work by the rules. If she really kicked butt she would have dealt with the boat load of terrorists instead of jumping ship
What gets me is the writers had almost 2 years to write this season show. boo!
Maybe you are too young…but there was a time when the left said "Better red than dead."…sometimes I think the left thinks anything is better than being a patriotic american…if I hear the excuse that we should change our ways, whether it is for children, healthcare, capital punishment, etc, because we are the only western nation that does it differently….that's what we are….we built a nation that Europeans (and every other nation) flocked to…why would we want to emulate there socialistic ways…
Maybe these characters are not the bad guys, but I wish they were:
FBI Larry Moss
The VP
Garafalo
Ethan
The President (just on general principles)
For sure a bad guy, but I sincerely wish he were not
Jon Voigt
I don't worry about believability. Season 1 supposesdly the best, stretched believability many times and had a few outright soap opera cliches – I groaned at the amnesia subplot.
I agree, that I don't think they are wimping out —- several times Jack has been proven right, and the FBI has often looked silly. The height of silliness was when Larry was 'interrogating' Tony. He might as well have brought paper dolls in for him to play with.
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