LOS ANGELES — Can Jack Bauer make it in the age of Obama?
Bauer, the counterterrorism agent at the center of Fox’s serialized hit “24,” is an archetype of the Bush years. The series made its debut just two months after 9/11, at a time when the nation seemed ready to embrace a hero who did not stop to ask questions about legal niceties in his pursuit of the bad guys.
Five years later the series, like the Bush administration, was engulfed in controversy over how it treated suspected terrorists. In fall 2006 the creators of “24” received a visit from the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point and other experts in military interrogation, who told them that West Point cadets and soldiers in Iraq were being influenced by the uninhibited — and unrepentant — use of torture on the series.
When “24” begins its seventh season on Sunday with a two-night, four-hour premiere, much will have changed in the world since Bauer was last on the job. The show opens with Bauer testifying before a Senate committee investigating the use of torture by his dismantled Counter Terrorist Unit, and the producers face the daunting task of acknowledging that the public’s view of Bauer’s methods might have changed without sacrificing their hero and making him renounce all that he has stood for.
Fox faces an equally challenging task in trying to revive a series that suffered a sharp decline in its audience over the course of its sixth season, which ended in May 2007 and was viewed by many fans and most critics as being among the weakest since the show began.
During its nearly 20 months off the air — a hiatus that was extended by last year’s strike by television writers — overall viewing of network television programs has declined precipitously, especially among serialized shows like “24,” which, with their season-long story lines, require viewers to keep abreast of weekly developments.
“I think we all took this year as somewhat of a challenge, in the wake of some of the criticism that had been leveled at Season 6 and politically some of the things that the show had weathered,” Howard Gordon, an executive producer of “24,” said in an interview last month at the show’s production facilities in the Chatsworth neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley here.
Peter Liguori, chairman of Fox Entertainment, said he was confident the fans would return to the series, citing the 12 million viewers who tuned in to a two-hour prequel episode in November. That was only slightly below the estimated 13 million viewers who, on average, watched each episode in the sixth season, according to Nielsen Media Research. “It’s a wildly loyal audience,” Mr. Liguori said, one that includes a large number of so-called time-shifters, who record the show for later viewing.
That optimism notwithstanding, the writers’ strike probably came at the best possible time for “24.”
“Season 6 was our weakest year creatively,” said Mr. Gordon, who is the show’s lead writer and responsible for day-to-day operations. “That said, the reaction to it was outsized to the quality of the show itself.”
As the writers and producers sat down in spring 2007 to draw the outlines of Season 7, they knew, Mr. Gordon said, that most of the low-hanging fruit in the action genre had already been picked: Bauer had foiled assassination attempts, interrupted bomb plots, saved his family, lost his family and been imprisoned and tortured.
The new season was to be set in Africa, but that plan was scrapped when the strike interrupted production after eight episodes. When it became apparent that filming wouldn’t resume in time to get a full season on the air until early 2009, Fox urged the producers to create a sort of interstitial episode to reintroduce the series.
That resulted in “24: Redemption,” the movie that was broadcast in November and used the Africa setting. (For his role in the prequel, Kiefer Sutherland, who has previously won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Jack Bauer, has been nominated for another Golden Globe, and the awards will be handed out Sunday on NBC at the same time that “24” resumes on Fox.) Meanwhile the new season kept Africa as a backdrop but moved the primary setting to Washington for a fortuitously timed change in administrations, both on the series and in real life.
Mr. Gordon and his staff also had more time to contemplate the political firestorm that erupted after a February 2007 article in The New Yorker magazine revealed the military’s concern about the show’s effect on soldiers. Mr. Gordon said that too helped the series gain a new focus.
It also led Mr. Gordon to participate in “Primetime Torture,” a short film produced by Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization that helped bring the “24” producers together with the military advisers. David Danzig, who oversaw the production, created the film for use by military educators. It uses interviews with former military interrogators to emphasize that techniques popularized on shows like “24” are rarely effective — or legal — in real life.
Nevertheless Mr. Danzig said he was nervous about the degree to which the new season of “24” would take the film’s lessons to heart. “Howard Gordon deserves a lot of credit, outside the lines of the show, for trying to do the responsible thing,” Mr. Danzig said.
But he said he had doubts that those views would completely translate into the program’s plot. Mr. Danzig noted that previews portray Jack Bauer as vigorously defiant in defending his methods of interrogation, which have included beatings, stabbings, electrocutions and the use of drugs, suffocation and other coercive measures. “I fear that the result,” he said, “will be for the show to contend that Bauer has always been right.”
Early on, Bauer does begin to show a softer side, becoming reflective about the questions he is being asked. “We’ve done so many secret things over the years in the name of protecting this country, we’ve created two worlds — ours and the people we promise to protect,” Bauer says. “They deserve to know the truth. Then they can decide how far they want to let us go.”
Mr. Gordon said that Bauer’s more nuanced worldview “wasn’t designed to answer directly to The New Yorker piece or the visit from the generals.”
“It was to sort of account for the fact that the world has changed,” he added, “that things are much more complex than maybe we thought, and that some of our actions have had consequences in the world.”
At times Mr. Gordon appears uneasily to straddle the two sides in the debate over the program’s depictions of torture. On the one hand he defends the show against the claims that it causes anyone to commit acts that he wouldn’t be inclined to commit anyway. “If our field interrogators are being more impacted by Jack Bauer than by their training, then obviously ‘24’ shouldn’t be the one being skewered, it should be the training and the supervision of these field interrogators,” he said.
But he also said that he has sometimes hidden behind the claim that “24” is just a television show, but that he no longer believes so. The debates “have made us more sensitive to some of the things we’ve done, and that is why I think we’ve actually dug deeper,” he said. “You’ll see very key scenes throughout the course of the year reflecting, I think, some fairly nuanced arguments on these very subjects.”
Over the years the creators of “24” have bragged that it has drawn accolades from fans as diverse as Rush Limbaugh and Barbra Streisand. This year, in addition to Cherry Jones in the role of the president, new cast members include Janeane Garofalo, the comic and former host of a liberal radio talk show, and Jon Voigt, an ardent conservative.
Their participation, Mr. Gordon said, implies that the show does not serve one political agenda. He also said that anyone who claims that “24” has promoted torture should also acknowledge that with Dennis Haysbert it cast an African-American president seven years ago.
“If we’re going to take the blame for Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, I think we should at least get the credit for Obama,” he said. “It’s the other side of the same coin.”http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc
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