It has been criticised for its 'right-wing' outlook, but the new series of '24' shows no signs of compromise, writes Shane Hegarty
It really started the day Jack Bauer came to work with a head in his bag. Having infiltrated a right-wing militia, a nuclear bomb was about to go off in Los Angeles and Bauer needed information fast. So, to prove his loyalty, he shot and beheaded a paedophile who was the chief witness against them.
His boss wasn't impressed, but Bauer had no time for such wishy-washy moralising. "That's the problem with people like you, George," he spat. "You want results, but you never want to get your hands dirty." Does Donald Rumsfeld watch 24? Does George W. Bush thrill to the heroics of Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) as he once again stops LA from being blown up, poisoned or otherwise decimated before the 24-hour clock ticks down? And are they quietly envious? Because Bauer and 24 get away with doing things the US government has to pretend it doesn't.
Or are Rumsfeld and Bush privately thankful? Because 24 is all about paranoia; about imminent terrorist threat and the sleeper cell in your neighbourhood, and about the tough measures needed to stop it. No television drama better captures - and exploits - the mood of post-9/11 America.
Tomorrow night, the fourth series of the thriller starts. Once again, Bauer is on the trail of crazed terrorists. Once again, he has only 24 one-hour episodes in which to stop it from happening. Yet again, there will be at least three outrageous twists per hour. This time the enemy is a suburban Islamic family, plotting carnage. "What we will accomplish today will change the world," the father tells his son over breakfast. "We are fortunate that our family has been chosen to do this."
American Muslim groups are deeply unhappy, one saying that it "casts a cloud of suspicion over every American Muslim family out there". As compensation, the broadcaster, Fox, offered them two public service announcements that showed Muslims in a positive light. Meanwhile, in Britain, Sky One will now show an altered version of the series. However the people behind the show are unrepentant. "This year we deal with it," said co-creator Joel Surnow.
"This is what we fear - Islamic terrorism. This is what we are fighting." A couple of series ago, 24 featured Islamic terrorists trying to detonate a nuclear device in LA, but writers tempered it by making the chief baddie a WASP-ish blonde all-American who had turned against her country. Now the makers wish they hadn't done that. It had, according to Surnow, "pulled punches".
THE FIRST SERIES, made before the attack on the World Trade Centre but broadcast after it, featured Dennis Hopper as a Serb out for revenge. Since then, however, the plots have been particularly piquant. Most obvious has been its employment of torture to keep the plot moving. The coalition may have trouble fending off public outrage over Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, but 24 has no such concerns. Bauer has tortured and been tortured; killed and been killed (he was, of course, revived). Journalists have been locked up.
Power has been abused. And it has gone all the way to the top.
Back in the real world, US attorney-general Alberto Gonzales was recently asked by a Senate committee if the president could authorise torture of a prisoner. Gonzales's evasive reply was that it was irrelevant because that situation would never arise. Well, in 24 it did, and there was only one option. President David Palmer needed information about a coup plot, and so ordered the torture of one of his aides. The president watched via CCTV as his aide was electrocuted using water and a defibrillator machine.
The thing about Palmer is that he is a black, separated President. His opponents are always shifty white men. It is never said, but you are left with little doubt that he is a Democrat, a good Hollywood president. Yet for all that liberal sheen, his decisions reveal an authoritarian zeal. When a journalist threatened to break a sensitive story, for instance, President Palmer had him kidnapped. Michael Moore would have a field day.
"I genuinely believe that 24 is a very right-wing product," argues David Wilson, professor of criminal justice at University of Central England, Birmingham. "It probably articulated the right-wing view of what the US should do in relation to domestic and international terrorism threats before politicians did." Prof Wilson has studied the show closely, finding six incidents of torture in the first 12 episodes of the second series alone.
THE BEHEADING OF the suspect, he says, was a way of softening the viewer up for other morally dubious decisions to come. The writers made him a paedophile because neither characters nor viewers would care about his death.
"This is, of course, fiction," he adds, "but the relation between what we are watching on TV in 24 and the continuing absence of rights for suspects on Guantanamo Bay, the more general denigration of lawyers and judges and the supposed threats posed to the USA by the Islamic world which have been used to justify an invasion of Iraq, seems perilously close to reality."
Of course, torture in 24 also serves the more immediate purpose of moving the plot along. If it has no time for Bauer to take a toilet break or eat lunch, it's hardly going to give each suspect a phone call to then wait for his lawyer to come over. And as the plot has drawn complaints of bias, there has been the suggestion that this new series will depict a particularly humiliating revenge for American human rights abuses.
"One of the things we want to do is make people ask the right questions," co-writer Virgil Williams has insisted. "I know we don't want to give people opinions. That's not our job. Our job is to entertain."
24 begins on Sky One, tomorrow at 9 p.m. www.fox.com/24