You can't make me talk unless... GAAWK!

OK, I'll talk.

It's a Fox Show, so its fair and balanced.  Naturally.

And (as I guess you know), this is the second black President - David Palmer, Wayne Palmer's brother, was first.  (They would be second and third respectively if you count Bill Clinton, I suppose...).

For several seasons the bad guys have been a far-right war-mongering oil-driven corporate cabal, and, as you noted, there are plenty of left-sympathetic themes.

However, on the very specific question of whether torture is effective, the show is unequivocal - almost everyone talks (except Jack Bauer), and normally pretty quickly, so torture is always worth a try.  (OK, spoiler - last season Jack tortured a guy's wife becaue he knew the guy was too tough to talk in a timely fashion...)

And since torture (on this show) always involves a ticking bomb, the ethical debate is framed in the most pro-torture way possible.

That said, it is a television show.

But from the few episodes I've seen, and from every analysis from both liberals and the wingers, it has become obvious to me that the show is pro-torture.  

As the season has progressed, it continues to deliver over-the-top goodies by the nuclear suitcase-load.  I thought the scene last season where Jack Bauer shot his former mentor's wife in the leg was pretty amazing, but we've already topped it this season, in which Jack Bauer TORTURES HIS OWN BROTHER and then their father actually KILLS HIM!!!  Yow!!!  And the latest Jack Bauer love interest appears to be the sister in law, who apparently married Jack's weaselly brother as a consolation prize or something.*

Unfortunately, though, I don't think the White House intrigue is going to be anywhere near as interesting this time around.  The president is a mere shadow of his older brother, and the White House staffers are little more than single-dimension puppets delivering standard security vs. freedom monologues at each other.  I have some hope for the sister, but we'll have to wait and see.

with regards to torture, give me "Rome" any day of the week: truth isn't really the issue, so much as politics and fun are. it's just damn fun to torture someone! not to mention, it's just much more believable than "24". also, "Deadwood" rates right up there as well, for most of the same reasons, though they don't torture people a lot, they just shoot them.

How disturbing that this fascist right wing propaganda disguised as entertainment is watched by millions of American children and young people.

I met Sutherland in Murphy's bar in LA in 1988. We were playing pinball. We were both pretty drunk. Nice guy. Short. Never watched a full episode of 24. Ridiculous show.

As I recently wrote about it:

Although many critics slam the show as being slanted to the right or anti-Muslim, the current storyline also touches on the importance of civil liberties to democracies, and even the scenes regarding torture aren't so clear-cut. Sutherland's character, Jack Bauer, is often portrayed as wracked with guilt when forced to resort to brutality in order to get people to talk, and sometimes the show suggests that he went too far.

Mayer's take is way off.

I still can't get over the New York Post article near the end of last season, which ran with a headline about how the actor playing the president  channelled Clinton - just in a presidential sense - and yet the article said nothing about his uncanny physical resemblance to Nixon nor to the obvious similiarities to the Bush Administration the whole season long.

Life's a lot more like this.  But, we won't catch TV writers going in for poetry.  Not when they can get an hour of alone time with Karl "I don't want my kid picking tomatoes" Rove, smoke cigars with Rush Limbaugh,and have private dinners with Justice Thomas and his wife.  Nuh-uh.  
Not when the Vice President's wife and daughter feel free to break secrecy to tell that they are super fans of the show.

Aside:  Why do I get the feeling "24" night at Casa Cheney features their eyelock on the show like the cast of Cronenberg's 1996 Crash watching crash-test footage.  If you've seen the flick, you know what I'm talking about....

The gist of the NYer article, which I think may have been missed in the main post, is that "24" serves both to normalize and legitimate torture, and further to undermine both the idea and the respectability of The Rule of Law.  It matters not whether it's good TV.  Watching torture - and a lot of what goes on in that show is torture by any rational definition - desensitizes the viewers to torture.  Watching the attitudes of the players in that drama toward law and The Rule of Law - mocking it, or having terrists ("ironically") come back and bite these principles' defenders in the behind (or worse) - tells the viewers that neither law nor the Rule of Law are worthy of respect, and insisting on it is a waste of time and effort.  Just get in there, find the designated bad guy (and, similar to much of the criminal justice system, they don't need the Right Bad Guy, rather they just need A Bad Guy) and then take out rage on the bad guy.

That, and the fact that when responsible authorities - the Dean at West Point and senior FBI officials - asked the producers to dial back the torture because it was making their job of inculcating the correct information into their charges, the producers blew them off.

That sort of anti-law and anti-Rule of Law propaganda is designed and intended to generate support for the sort of Rethuglican wet dream which boiled to the surface in this exchange yesterday between Tweety and the Rethug House Whip, Cantor of Virginia[my transcription]:

Tweety (T): Well, how many wars are we going to have to fight in our lifetime;  you want to go to war with Iran now?
Rethug Cantor (R): Well, Chris, I'm not the one saying we should take anything off the table.
* * * [Cantor blather] * * *
T This is not a multiple choice question;  right now, February 8, 2007, do you think we should go to war with Iran?
R Chris, I'll leave that decision up to the commanders on the ground and those in our military establishment.  [watch Tweety's eyes and jaw from about 00:32 in the clip, right before they cut from split screen!]
T  Commanders on the ground whether to go to war with another country?!
R  I will leave the decisions in the military arena - and this is exactly the point ...
T  This is Barry Goldwater talking!  He used to say that:  regional commanders can decide whether to use nuclear weapons!  You're honestly saying that soldiers should decide which country to go to war with!
R  I'm certainly here to say that the military experts are those which come up with the recommendations to the Commander-in-Chief to make the decision.  I mean, it's silly for us to expect that we're going to have five [cross-talk by T directed at Dem. guest to the effect of "you're going to leave peace and war to the soldiers and commander-in-chief?  Never in my life have I ever heard...."] hundred thirty five commanders-in-chief.
Dem Guest:  No.  Congress has a constitutional responsibility to decide whether we going to go to war or not.  That's what we're elected to do.  Those are the debates we should have.
R:  E---very president since....
T:  [cuts him off] The idea of declaring was as a soldier is unimaginable.  We'll be right back... break...
return...

T  Congressman Cantor, let me ask you very clearly to clear up our little discussion [in other words, you've made a fool of yourself and here's a lifeline] , if the US Congress were to vote tomorrow morning whether to declare war on Iran, would you vote "yea"?
R  [very definitively] This Congress is not gonna do that because it is the Commander-in-Chief's role, Chris, and Steve [Dem guest] knows that as well.  It's not Congress that will ask for that, it is the Commander-in-chief that will make that decision.  Every president, whether Republican or Democrat since the War Powers Act [n.b. - It's not an Act, it's a Resolution] was in place has interpreted it as being the Commander-in-Chief's role to do that.
T  Would you support the President if he declared war on Iran tomorrow morning?  As things are right now?
R  Well, I will support what is in the best interests of securing this homeland and providing our troops with what they need.  And, if there is a threat on the ground in Iraq and in the region and our troops need it, I will support them.  And that is exactly the point on this Iraqi resolution, because the Democrats want to have their cake and eat it, too.  This is a non-binding resolution, it is a sense of Congress, it doesn't mean anything and in fact it pollutes the message and it sends a wrong message to our troops [Tweety cuts him off]
T  Congressman, what's the role of Congress in war and peace?
D:  Congress, under the Constitution of the United States, authorizes war, and the War Powers Act requires Congress to vote on whether we should insert troops into hostile situations.  The law is clear ...
R:  Absolutely not...
D:  C'mon, Eric.
R:  Absolutely not;  the Commander-in-chief ... the Constitution gives the Commander-in-chief ... [Tweety, exasperated]
T  Congressman Cantor, why did the President ask for approval before he went to Iraq?
R  Well, I think that his counsel certainly gave him guidance as to why he needed to do that.  But, at the end of the day the Constitution gives the Commander in chief the right to send out troops into battle.
T  Ok, well, maybe when it comes to war we don't need a Congress according to that.  Thank you ...

She basically plans her life around "24."

What this is a very old recipe. The Saturday "Serial." Which was about 20 minutes of none stop action shown every Saturday at the end of the feature and had about 12 episodes. The heroes and villains were sharply defined and every week the show ended with the hero about to be blown up, or the wagon with the heroine running off the cliff, etc. Of course they always escaped.

I'd guess that none of you actually ever watched one of these. If we missed an episode we would find someone who did and beg him or her for all the gory details... (We had a great female story teller in my class whose mother sold tickets at the theater. Naturally she never missed a Saturday and was immensely popular.)

I don't know if you consider being tied up and made to watch a fuse burn towards kegs of powder abuse, or torture. I think it is abuse, with a very short period of torture as the explodee suffers the pain of very rapid burning, aka an explosion.

We had no episodes of the villain having panties on his head, and if we had we would have been unable to understand it. In fact, the villains were always cleanly shot from a six gun that held at least a 100 bullets or trounced with the fists of the hero.

It was about as real as a Saturday Evening Post cover and we loved them all.

It took the Korean war to make cynics of us, brought to us by a national government that for the first time forgot that you fight only to win. This was further pounded into us during Vietnam and we see the fruits of this tree marching in the streets today.

As I watched "24" last Monday I happened to think about  all the conversations about the show and I was further reminded of what Patton supposedly said while he was visiting a particular deadly battlefield.

"God, I do love it so."