Has ‘24′ Gone PC?

Written by Alicia CohncloseAuthor: Alicia Cohn Name: Alicia Cohn
Email: alicia.m.cohn@gmail.com
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About: Freelance writer from the Heartland.See Authors Posts (11) on February 5, 2010

The TV show “24″ has often been criticized in the past for breaking mainstream rules about political correctness. The trend started with the pilot, which was scheduled to premiere on FOX shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. After a short delay, the episode aired with controversial scenes of a terrorist attack on an airplane mostly intact. “24″ has continued that trend for the past seven seasons, and since it has been a wildly popular show about terrorism in a country awakening to terrorism as reality, “24″ has from time to time been blamed for influencing public sentiment. In previous years, the show made the kind of choices no other action-oriented show dared, such as making Middle Eastern characters turn out to be terrorists (the kind of thing that has been known to happen once in awhile in the “real world”).

One year, “24″ star Kiefer Sutherland (super-cop Jack Bauer himself) actually shot a PSA which aired immediately after the show. In the ad, Sutherland spoke seriously to the audience to assure them that the Muslims, Arabs, or vaguely Middle Eastern people living next door probably were not secretly plotting to blow up their community because “24″ is a work of fiction. Most Americans had already resigned themselves to the fictional nature of “24″ by this time, since if Bauer were real he’d be at the airport stopping all the real-life terrorists with explosives in their shoelaces and underwear and he wouldn’t care if it took profiling to do it so long as it got the job done. Nonetheless, Bauer and “24″ continued to take creative chances by depicting situations terrifyingly close to the audience’s real life fears and blowing them up.

Season eight of “24″ returned in January, and the latest terrorist threat faced by Jack Bauer and the government-sponsored Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) once again seems inspired by the latest real-life headlines. Making Iran the Big Bad of 2010 was a brilliant choice on paper, since the looming threat and ever-growing number of nuclear facilities in that Middle East country makes everybody at least vaguely uneasy.

The problem is, “24″ has so homogenized the bad guys this season that they aren’t scary. Weaponized nuclear power in the Islamic Republic ought to be terrifying, but the pro-bomb, anti-West thugs on “24″ are so Hollywood-ized that they are essentially interchangeable with the drug dealers from season three. Meanwhile, the “leader of the Islamic Republic” Omar Hassan (Anil Kapoor) bears similarities to previous seasons’ U.S. presidents (except Dennis Haysbert, who stands alone) and shows no signs of the striking, articulate, and terrifyingly single-minded charisma of the real-life president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It would actually be difficult to exaggerate Ahmadinejad as a “bad guy” character, since even as himself he is interesting and unpredictable to watch. In a drama like “24″ where Jack Bauer always (eventually) takes the bad guy down–no matter how big or how bad–a bad guy who even faintly resembled Ahmadinejad would make for fresh, compelling drama.

Instead, “24″ gives us Hassan, who just seems flawed and misunderstood (unhappy in his marriage and apparently just trying to get along with U.S. President Taylor), a new batch of straight-laced staff at CTU (at least one of which–Katee Sackhoff of “Battlestar Galactica,” who deserves better–has a “dark secret” in her past), and a hero who really just wants to retire (hard to understand why he doesn’t, since at this point it seems almost anybody else could do the same job he is doing–including Freddie Prinze Jr., another unimpressive new member of the cast).

The appeal of Jack Bauer has always been his fearless ability to sideline the “politically correct” thing when it gets in the way of a job that needs doing. Unfortunately, “24″ seems to have turned into a homogeneous, color-inside-the-lines action series, and now that its hero has lost his infamous edge, suddenly a “24″ without Jack doesn’t seem absurd. Jack Bauer is back, but he’s been neutered.

The world hasn’t gotten less scary since September 2001, but suddenly Jack Bauer is taking down scarecrows, leaving the real bad guys of 2010 to keep on generating headlines unchecked.