Jack Bauer's bad days return

This recent CNN article on the upcoming season of 24 is a pretty typical puff promo piece: producers and cast members talking up the surprises and newly intense narrative trickery, er, arcs, the show has in store for the legions of Jack Bauer fans. I gave up on taking the show seriously as soon as Kim landed in CTU, but I’m a sucker for the utterly unhinged suspense it offers. Dumb, laughably absurd and always ready to spit out a harddrive’s worth of idiotic, meaningless tech jargon to explain away any problematic plot point, it’s still the best pure adrenalin rush on the idiot box. What’s funny is that some of the quotes in the latter half of the article actually hint at a lot of this. Newcomer Samwise Gamgee, er, Sean Astin, says:

"The main challenge was memorizing all the techno-talk. There are five- or six-page scenes full of dialogue! 'Yeah, that's television,' I was told," he laughs.

And right afterwards, producer Howard Gordon gleefully cops to the rather outlandish nature of the show’s plot:

Gordon notes that the series -- which plays out in real time, with each season covering 24 hours -- doesn't "go after big names just for their reputations. Our material is deceptively challenging to deliver (credibly), some of these outrageous twists and turns ... and it requires the right amount of seriousness, intelligence and emotion. And Kiefer, of course, sets the tone."

That’s a rare find – a major market preview piece that actually gets a producer of a semi-serious show like 24, which at least began with pretension towards doing something other than cooking up suspense like McDonald’s cooks burgers, to admit that the show’s plot lacks credibility. Even that, though, is a Big Mac sized understatement; saying 24’s narrative twists lack credibility is akin to saying Air America has a few differences of opinion with Rush Limbaugh.

Still, Gordon is right to highlight Kiefer Sutherland’s performance as all-purpose special agent Jack (of all trades) Bauer. No matter how ludicrous the situation, Sutherland's steely seriousness anchors it in a violent, determined sobriety, laying out the always-ridiculously-high stakes like warnings from God himself, or at least Donald Rumsfeld. He’s driven by an absolutely unrelenting focus on one goal: catch the terrorist, whatever extravagant measures that may require. And to the show’s credit, those measure reach into extremity on a pretty regular basis.

In the final tally, I think, it’s the show’s willingness to take its outrageous storylines to their most heart-rattling, violent, preposterous ends that makes it work. Think about it: how many other action/suspense/sci-fi/adventure shows actually dangle the possibility of genuinely catastrophic outcomes – characters dying, bad guys scoring major victories, etc…? A few come to mind: Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, The Sopranos. But for the most part, the standard television format of unrelated, standalone episodes doesn’t allow for the setup and situation to change, and as such, there’s never any real suspense. Despite delving into credibility-straining silliness and garbled tech talk at nearly every opportunity, 24 works because it actually builds in real possibilities for disaster and failure into its nerve-strangling format.