Joel Surnow has made it possible for Barack Obama to win pink states.
Obviously "24" jumped the shark after season 4. The battle for downtown L.A. and the attack on a Haliburton-like international company (with its own military) climaxed, and ended, the show. Who really wants to watch Jack Bauer defend himself before wimpy "Congressional liberals" in the coming season's "new turn"?
No, it is the first season of "24" I refer to. Joel Surnow and his team set up an imaginary world in which there was only one moral certainty, amid chaos: President David Palmer. There was one sun around which even the rogue agent Jack Bauer revolved: President David Palmer. There was one man who we the audience saw making every decision, decisions we knew to be the correct ones given the circumstances, even though we knew the circumstances would never publicly redound to his credit. President David Palmer.
Jack Bauer only makes sense if he is defending the state. Making the state "David Palmer" created a moral center with its own gravitational field, its own ethical universe. Give me one more minute to explain.
No one has correctly diagnosed the effect of "24"'s impact on America.
For Joel Surnow, click here.
This early analysis gets it wrong: here.
Lucia Bozzola, here is closer to the mark.
David Palmer was not just at the center of the first season. His approval, actual if always deniable, was the king's seal on an imaginary letter giving Jack the right to do whatever was necessary to save the state. Writers want to showcase the most morally ambiguous crisis as the climax of every act, in which one can understand the opposition to the action depicted on screen, as well as the ultimate, if penalized, necessity to it. This is classic Robert McKee, budding screenwriters out there, and it is clear that scenes of torture fit the bill: that's why there's so many of them. But let's remember that Jack was scarred by his own actions in season one: the penalties against him were personal and emotional; his defensiveness had not set in (that was the following season); he was profoundly weary. Jack's moral compass was his relationship with President David Palmer. By keeping the king's seal in his breast pocket, so to speak, Jack was indemnified against the ultimate reproach: being wrong.
Later on, granted, looking back at the season and others increasingly like it, including the fourth, one begins to take a different view, and wonders whether the constant torture scenes also have indemnified real torturers in our Iraqi and Cuban prisons.
But consider the corollary: the effect of seeing a steady, courageous hand on the tiller, and the hand was an African American one. Of course the president's race was a factor. President Palmer brought a sense of gravitas and destiny when he appeared on screen: Wow, we thought, in the future we have come a long way: we've elected a black man as president. Palmer was blacker than Colin Powell, or Obama, or Jesse Jackson. If he's made it here -- on Fox television -- surely he is something special, was the feeling in our hind-brains. God knows what he had to weather. God knows what he had to go through. Surely Palmer could not be accused of waltzing into office like a Bush or Kennedy, to the manor born. He had to be good.
Then, once the show started, we watched again and again as circumstances produced situations where immediate action was required, and the penalty to be paid later meant personal capital would have to be exhausted, people's feelings hurt, trusted advisers would have to be exposed as weasels and turncoats, and only those willing to sacrifice everything for their country could be trusted.
Joel Surnow, you have not only made it possible for many "independents" to "think" in terms of a black president. You made it possible for Americans in swing states who loved your show to put aside their prejudices and vote Barack Obama into office. Thank you, and thanks to Fox.