It gets more and more painful to watch people clinging to the television show 24. The TV show runs on the gimmick that each season is just one day in the life of super agent anti-terrorist man Jack Bauer. Just 24 hours per season. That means that there have been just six days shown on the show, and really, just six days experienced by the characters (hint: They don’t exist while off screen). Sure, you’ve got some gaps of imaginary time between those 24 hour periods, but you wouldn’t know it by character development.
24 is still living just six days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, during that period when Americans looked up into the sky at the first planes allowed to fly again, and imagined that the jumbojets would soon come hurtling out of the sky at their own little neighborhoods in places like Skokie and West Des Moines. We suspected terrorists around every corner, just waiting to attack. Juan Williams got on National Public Radio and declared that he thought that we ought to use nuclear weapons against Muslim countries, just to be sure. Americans cried for the kind of vengeance viewers of 24 get to see when Jack Bauer tortures his prisoners and launches spittle against lawyers trying to preserve the Bill of Rights.
To those of us who live in the real world, where nearing two thousand days have taken place since the single day of terrorist attacks, it’s become quite apparent that there are not terrorists lurking everywhere. The United States of America is quite safe and secure, and there never was much threat of a massive wave of terrorist threats. September 11, 2001 was an aberration. We don’t need torture. We don’t need to surrender the Bill of Rights.
We don’t live in the Homeland anymore, and it’s starting to make us cringe when we hear politicians talk about the Homeland as if it is a real place.
The trouble with 24 is that it still lives in the paranoid past, the past that doesn’t have the benefit of anything more than 6 days of perspective. 24 is a paranoid insult to the traditional American values of liberty and common decency. Worse than that, in the ethical code of TV Land, 24 is out of touch. An honest final season of 24 would show Jack Bauer running around after terrorists that don’t exist, slaughtering massive numbers of innocent people, torturing prisoners who haven’t done anything wrong, and giving shrill tirades against America’s freedom.
I don’t think we’re going to see such a show any time soon, because it isn’t just Jack Bauer, but also a large number of 24‘s fans, who prefer to live in the past rather than acknowledging the truth that’s been discovered since 2001. 24 is a willful fantasy for those who hate the idea that America is a safe place to live, and would rather live in violence than live in liberty.
I’m addicted to 24 in spite of the political slant. It’s at least as slickly produced as the West Wing. Also the characters are not just attractive people running around shooting up things, as in the show’s predecessr La Femme Nikita, but they are real people with personal problems that get in the way of chasing the bad guys. The terrorists are not one-dimensional either, and if there are some nasties, they also have sympathetic family members.
La Femme Nikita I used to see abroad, in fact people would call me Nikita on the street in reference to the show’s romantic lead, who always managed to shoot up a lot of bad guys with a machine gun just before the denoument. The show always had some psychological twist at the end where the show’s characters, who were all good at heart, find out they have been given misinformation by their superiors, and innocent people have also died while they got the bad guys. 24 had to rewrite a scene about assassination of a president–they would never get that kind of message past their censors.