A little over 7 years ago, just after “September the 11th” changed everything (including how far I would go in using metaphors to describe failed romances), Fox began running promos for a new show starring Kiefer Sutherland.  The show looked exciting and the usage of Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff” was a brilliant marketing move.  It made the show instantly appealling to 21 year old college seniors who were going through some sort of delayed teenage angst.  The show promised to cover one day in real time and as Jack Bauer said in the commercial, “This is going to be the longest day of my life.”

That show was 24 and for 3 seasons, especially the first, it delivered the goods.  It was so well done that we overlooked several things that have persisted throughout the show’s run:

• everyone who possibly needs to see Jack Bauer or members of his fictional CTU department is at most a 15 minute drive away – no exceptions
• the government has a 1:1 spy-to-honest employeed ratio – government background checks are apparently as rigorous as a McDonald’s application
• internet connections and wifi connections are flawless and super fast everywhere all the time
• no one has ever eaten food or gone to the bathroom during any of the days covered by 24

But 24 has lost both its moral and creative integrity.  First, creatively, there is just no way that what takes place takes place within a week, let alone a day.  They just don’t care about making it even seem remotely plausible anymore.  To get anywhere in Washington DC in the new “day” all that is needed is a commercial break (3 minutes).  Furthermore, I am tired of the 18 different plots that happen to occur on the same “day.”  I feel like HBO could do 24 (or 12 in their case) so much better because they are usually dealing with a more sophisticated audience and could stand to have some realism and down moments in the show.  Ther 24 audience is like a crack addict – instead of liking the first few hits and being satisfied woth the pace and quality, the audience demanded more action, more hits, more potency is until they have lost their metaphorical teeth and sucked some metaphorical- you get what I’m saying.

This season they were at such a lost they actually brought a character back from the dead.  So now Jesus Christ is working as a rogue agent with Jack Bauer.  And I am sure according to Rupert Murdoch and the Fox creative team, Jesus Christ will torture suspects if it works.

Which brings me to 24’s moral credibility.

In 24 torture always works.  Always.  In the first 4 hours of the current “day”, Bauer goes from a congressional hearing investigating his torture of a suspect (which worked and which Bauer defends a la Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men) to help the FBI.  No sooner does the good and earnest FBI agent Jack is working with have an opportunity to torture a suspect does she do it.  Twice – once telling Jack to (but that was a bluff) and a second tiem where she does it herself to a man in the hospital.  And of course she gets the information she needs.

I guess before hope and change come to the White House, Rupert Murdoch wanted to put out one more propaganda laden torture fest to defend Bush and Cheney.  Do I sound paranoid?  Does this not seem like something Murdoch could and would do?  Maybe not directly, but surely there are ways of influencing the content on a television station you own.  And as Oscar Wilde put it, life imitates art.  Vapid women looking to Sex and the City for culture cues are nothing compared to the government and soldiers taking their cues from 24, which is partly what they’ve done according to Jane Meyer’s The Dark Side.

The bottom line is that the show sucks creatively and has influenced and reinforced people’s ideas as to the effectiveness and permissibility of torture.  But with Lost coming back I cannot definitively say that 24 is the worst show on television.  Any show that spends 2 1/2 years figuring out what it wants to do at the expense of millions of fans is pretty bad.