I don't have any friends - Jack Bauer
The Fox television series
24 live another day this time covers 12 hours rather than 24 and can be viewed without having seen any of the prior seasons and it's nice to see Stephen Fry as the UK PM. It is still as the producers call it "the soap opera on crack" but it's also a Heckler-Koch gun commercial with Jack's CTU CIA standard HK USP .45 SOCOM sidearm upgraded to the P-30 model in .40 and the ubiquitous Glock 17 rather than the occasional SigSauer P-226, and the assault weapons are mainly the new MP7. The exterior location cinematography gives the look of BBC productions such as Spooks (known as MI-5 in some countries) but it's probably because of the film transfers and crew lighting in England although the LA interiors haven't been transformed enough - for example, the British Hotel uses the same set as the White House West Wing from the earlier seasons. And there are the other small budgetary details like using a stretch Mercedes rather than anything approximating the US Presidential Cadillac limousine. One hopes they eventually get a really well-budgeted full-length feature, unlike 24: Exile (2008) but it does seem like they cannot get funding to support the problem of complex synchronous writing in parallel perhaps like Vantage Point or 88 Minutes and tweak the format that reaches Bond-like or even Bourne-like dynamism with the real-time dimension that a bigger budget CGI-assisted two to three hour feature film might be able to create.
MTV has its own reasons for liking the new mini-season.
And for those who have the usual issues with standard television violence but will read about TV sex and Madmen on the FP, you might consider Mother Jones' revisionist take on 24 Torture-Heavy "24" Was Actually a Pretty Damn Liberal TV Show And nicer to Muslims than it usually gets credit for.
Unlike my dissatisfaction with Fox's Sleepy Hollow, there is a Bauerian philosophy albeit one published in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series: 24 and Philosophy: The World According to Jack Jennifer Hart Weed (Editor), Richard Brian Davis (Editor), Ronald Weed (Editor) November 2007, Wiley-Blackwell
Other Bauerian Fanzine-Festschrift
24: The Ultimate Guide, written by Michael Goldman featuring information about the first six seasons. This is considered by most fans as the 'definitive' book about 24. Fans have given it the nickname 'The 24 Encyclopedia' due to its all-inclusove information about the character detail, weapons, sets, vehicles, props, detailed season by season documentation, all full-color photographs, and the fact that the Forward is written by Co-Creator/Executive Producer Joel Surnow.
24: Behind the Scenes, featuring behind the scenes photographs and pictures. This is another stand-out volume, as the photoswere taken by Jon Cassar, 24 Co-Executive Producer/Director. Cassar also wrote the text, as well. A bonus DVD also is included.
24: The Counter Terrorist Unit Handbook, featuring a manual of how CTU works and their policies and procedures. It includes pictures from the first six seasons. A very quality book that comes in a beautiful 'clam-shell' box. Good stuff, good stuff.
The Tao of Jack Bauer: What Our Favorite Terrorist Buster Says About Life, Love, Torture, and Saving the World 24 Times in 24 Hours With No Lunch Break, a study of Jack Bauer's influence in society.
Secrets of 24: The Unauthorized Guide to the Political & Moral Issues Behind TV's Most Riveting Drama, which collects interviews and essays to pursue real issues of relevance to our times.
Jack Bauer for President: Terrorism and Politics in 24, another collection of essays.
Reading 24: TV against the Clock, a scholarly work of critical discussions of the series from many different perspectives.
Jack Bauer's Having a Bad Day: An Unauthorized Investigation of Faith in 24: Season 1, which uses each episode to help illustrate a spiritual concept.
-----WARNING-----SPOILERS ARE BELOW THE ORANGE SQUIGGLE-----WARNING-----
5:22 PM PT: This double episode 1 (11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.)/ 2 (12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.) is being reshown this evening Friday 9 May 2014
Note also that there is a
24spoilers site:
It is an oblique situation for President Heller who is suffering from alzheimer's, mistaking certain facts in meetings for example, mistaking FDR for TR's gunboat diplomacy. This series is about questioning drone deployment and there are over 12 explosions in this first set of episodes set in London. The back-story involves the US need to renew a UK lease on Diego Garcia as a drone launching base. Needless to say there are street protests against drone warfare shown as well. Recall of course that there have been eight seasons in this series, with the last real four year gap since the end of the last season although several years did pass between many seasons to account for presaging the first Black presidents among other things. Bauer is captured in the first 5 minutes and we are introduced to another rogue WH Chief of Staff who coincidentally is married to Audrey Heller, Jack's love interest from several prior seasons. Kate Morgan (Yvonne Strahovski from NBC's 'Chuck') is a field agent whose husband was caught trading secrets to the PRC and who's being transferred. Chloe is also being held in the CIA black site and is being interrogated. Many betrayals will comes as this episode has a bad guy get a knife jammed through his ear hole. The sub-plot of surveillance is perfect for the London context as free information hackers have within their population Chloe O'Brian as the Julian Assange/Chelsea Manning/Ed Snowden figure making secret documents available on the internet. She's already been in jail and is also on the run but is also the subject of Bauer's get-captured and rescue Chloe plan where Morgan is of course the more perceptive and heroic character working on the inside of the CIA which gets breached with a rifle grenade fired through the street. On the way we learn that Bauer seems to have worked with the Serbian mafia who may have helped Bauer's plan to free Chloe. The parallel plot is a US drone hijacked in Afghanistan that attacks convoy with a Hellfire missile. The drone operator Lt Chris Tanner is set-up in a diplomatic crisis that involves the Brits since two of their number are also killed in the drone strike. Apparently the CIA or more specifically Morgan has moles in either Scotland Yard or London's Metropolitan police. The Julian Assange figure is called Adrian Cross whose associate Derek Yates has been hacking into military weapons systems as direct action and develops a device to hijack drones 10 at a time which of course is the subject of the subsequent episode chase. Yates has been hired by a woman named Margot perhaps linked via the Serbians whose daughter is Yates' lover and killer and all of this is apparently a massive plot to target 10 sites for attack around London including the assassination of President Heller.
More weeks of fun ahead, buckle-up, and I may get a Chloe haircut....