"24: Redemption" Brings this Sleepy Season to Life
By Ed Martin TV / Video Download Archives
With the long-delayed seventh season of Fox’ 24 set to begin in January, the real-life story behind the show is almost as interesting as the fictional tales it tells.
First, 24 followed its sensational fifth season – which earned it an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series and brought Kiefer Sutherland top honors as Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series – with a sixth season that can only be described as a train wreck. (You just knew there was trouble ahead when a nuclear warhead was detonated in Valencia at the end of episode four and in the hours that followed life in L.A. seemed relatively unchanged. So what if there was a mushroom cloud on the horizon? Sure enough, the writers literally ran out of story about two-thirds of the way through the season, and the filler that followed was difficult to sit through.)
Then, the Writers Guild of America strike forced Fox to postpone season seven. An abrupt interruption of that kind would be a death knell for most shows, but may have been a godsend for 24, because this prolonged break gave its creative team time to really think through all twenty-four episodes to come, a luxury they had never before enjoyed prior to the start of a season. (Interestingly, 24 is the only scripted broadcast series to have disappeared for an entire season because of the WGA strike.)
Now, in a stroke of programming genius, Fox has produced a two-hour 24 movie (set to debut this Sunday at 8 p.m.) that neatly and effectively bridges the gap between the mess 24 had become when it was last seen in May 2007 and the promising thriller that will kick off in January 2009. 24: Redemption won’t make anyone’s best of anything lists, but it’s a whole lot more exciting than most of what has passed for broadcast drama during the first two months of this curiously humdrum season.
Fortunately, Redemption is set largely in Africa, far away from those Los Angeles locales that became so tiresome by season six. CTU has long since been dismantled, and the tirelessly self-sacrificing super-agent Jack Bauer has been on the run (across three continents) from a fresh threat: The United States government, which ludicrously wants to question him about charges of torturing people in his “custody” while he was busy saving millions of Americans (including a couple of presidents) from annihilation by terrorists. Jack has been lying low, helping old friend and mentor Carl Benton (Robert Carlyle) run a school for boys in the fictional country of Sangala, which is menaced by a sadistic war criminal who builds armies by kidnapping young boys and turning them into killing machines. Not surprisingly, the warlord has strong ties to someone equally evil in Washington, D.C. (Jon Voight, oozing menace).
With only two hours (rather than twenty-four) to tell their story, the writers waste no time here plunging Jack into the middle of the madness that threatens to consume Sangala. That means protecting Carl and the boys at the school and getting them out of the country before they can be kidnapped, killed or otherwise caught up in the bloody coup around them. This all comes down on the same day as the inauguration of a new president back home – the nation’s first female commander in chief, President-elect Allison Taylor (played by two-time Tony winner and likely future Emmy nominee Cherry Jones). As ever, there is already plenty of trouble brewing in our nation’s capital, just in time for Jack’s inevitable return to the States at the start of season seven. Happily, the D.C. sequences are more convincing than in seasons past and packed with possibilities for great drama in the months ahead.
There are a few things one might complain about in Redemption, though to discuss them in any detail would ruin key plot turns. So I’ll be vague: These two hours include much of the torture, torment and deeply personal loss that characterize this franchise, and I have to admit that, while watching it all unfold, I realized that I am suffering from compassion fatigue for our long-suffering hero. It’s not that I don’t want to care for Jack Bauer, it’s that I no longer can. I’m spent. The show’s writers since 2001 have done too much to this guy and taken too much away from him, and they show no signs of stopping here. The endless angst at this point feels, well, endless. Not pointless, but punishing. I wonder if this will impact my enjoyment of the season to come, just as I wonder if 24 would work as well if they cut Bauer a break for once.
That said, it’s amazing how deftly Kiefer Sutherland steps into Bauer’s shoes, even after a prolonged break. From the moment he first appears on screen you can feel the weight of Jack’s past experiences and see the toll they have taken on him – and then he carries all that forward and does the impossible all over again. Even after all these years Sutherland’s performance remains an extended instant classic.
Ed Martin
Ed Martin is the chief television and content critic for MediaVillage. He has written about television and internet programming for several Myers publications since 2000, including The Myers Report, The Myers Programming Report, MediaBizBloggers a…
