From the New Yorker.
The office desk of Joel Surnow—the co-creator and executive producer of “24,” th popular counterterrorism drama on Fox—face a wall dominated by an American flag in glass case. A small label reveals that the fla once flew over Baghdad, after the America invasion of Iraq, in 2003. A few years ago Surnow received it as a gift from an Arm regiment stationed in Iraq; the soldiers ha shared a collection of “24” DVDs, he told me until it was destroyed by an enemy bomb. “Th military loves our show,” he said recently Surnow is fifty-two, and has the gangly, coile energy of an athlete; his hair is close-cropped and he has a “soul patch”—a smidgen of bear beneath his lower lip. When he was young, h worked as a carpet salesman with his father The trick to selling anything, he learned, is t carry yourself with confidence and get th customer to like you within the first fiv minutes. He’s got it down.
“People in th Administration love the series, too,” he said. “It’s a patriotic show. They should love it.”...
“24,” which last year won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, packs an improbable amount of intrigue into twenty-four hours, and its outlandishness marks it clearly as a fantasy, an heir to the baroque potboilers of Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn. Nevertheless, the show obviously plays off the anxieties that have beset the country since September 11th, and it sends a political message.
The series, Surnow told me, is “ripped out of the Zeitgeist of what people’s fears are—their paranoia that we’re going to be attacked,” and it “makes people look at what we’re dealing with” in terms of threats to national security. “There are not a lot of measures short of extreme measures that will get it done,” he said, adding, “America wants the war on terror fought by Jack Bauer. He’s a patriot.”
...
For all its fictional liberties,
“24” depicts the fight against Islamist extremism much as the Bush Administration has defined it: as an all-consuming struggle for America’s survival that demands the toughest of tactics. Not long after September 11th, Vice-President Dick Cheney alluded vaguely to the fact that America must begin working through the “dark side” in countering terrorism. On “24,” the dark side is on full view. Surnow, who has jokingly called himself a “right-wing nut job,” shares his show’s hard-line perspective. Speaking of torture, he said, “Isn’t it obvious that if there was a nuke in New York City that was about to blow—or any other city in this country—that, even if you were going to go to jail, it would be the right thing to do?”
More...I guess this sort of confirms what we already knew, but it's an interesting read nonetheless. The creator of the show is all too happy to "do his part" by pushing the fear button. :puke:
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