Life After a TV Death

On Saturday March 27th, series co-producer/director Jon Cassar announced in a Twitter feed that Fox had decided to ax 24, ending a period of speculation as to whether the network would give the show another year of life.

So ends a ground-breaking show whose terrorist plots were built around 24 hours of a single day, and contained the greatest concentration of Canadian talent for a single TV series.

(Unless that Canuckle talent finds work soon, they may be doomed to appear in SyFy TV movies about alien marshmallows, or more Clive Barker ‘presentations’ based on napkin doodles scribbled during a Via ride to Vancouver.)

I’m actually not surprised the show’s been axed, though my suspicions are due to a number of issues. Season 1 was perfect, Season 2 was pretty good; Season 3 had one good episode, and the rest was rabbit rubbish; Season 4 had half a good episode, and the rest had the CTU unit reduced to the most inept group of secret service dingbats, incapable of protecting the U.S. from a rogue shipment of rancid cabbage.

I actually have no memory of Season 5 because it seems to have blurred with Season 6, but I do recall Season 6 being great fun, and making me eager for further adventures of Jack Bauer, a loyal American patriot (played by Canadian Kiefer Sutherland) who technically died in an episode, and technically still has a weak heart from all that shock-torture-drug stuff (ailments that everyone convenient ‘forgot’ in later seasons).

No matter, since Jack returned for a 7th and the current 8th Season, but I think the reason the show’s been felled may be due to its high cost (full action sequences spread over 24 episodes is pricey), a high-profile and very large cast, a star who may be getting tired of all that running and jumping, Fox’ alleging low ratings of a boo-hoo 9 million from prior 13 million, and perhaps the character of Bauer being less relevant today.

24 benefitted from a tense sense of paranoia within the U.S. of terror striking from sleeper cells and porous border control, and the series’ writers often incorporated current and possible news items that kept it current, but with the terror fear subjugated by real economic woes today, people may want outright escapism – 3D action and fantasy films – instead of a series that tells them Your World is Crumbling over 24 week period.

Even James Bond left a muffled impact at the box office last year with the rotten egg The Quantum of Solace, so perhaps stories about global terrorism or singular despots are too negative when people are losing houses, jobs, and the realities of living on credit push audiences for fantastic tales.

It’s all speculation, and it may well be audiences are growing tired of Bauer, but Fox can still exploit the character while he’s fresh in the minds of avid fans. What Fox and Sutherland shouldn’t do is a one-time feature film; it failed miserably on both occasions for The X-Files, and neither film offers anything of merit to the lore and characters of the show’s first five years.

What Fox and Sutherland should do is a series of TV movies – basically an entire season without the fat, silly tangents and filler episodes. Just Jack dealing with a persistent threat that unfolds in two, three or four 90 min. cliffhanger teleplays that closes the Bauer saga over a four month period.

The damned things would sell as a four-movie DVD set with longer director cuts and extras, and one of the most inventive shows ends with dignity, instead of being left unresolved, or picked up by another network (NBC’s been rumored to have expressed interest), and altered to suit the network’s in-house style.

Fox never cared what was said or shown on TV as long as ad sales and ratings were solid, so I doubt more conservative NBC would allow a character to have his body drilled repeatedly with a foot-long power tool. (It happened, and it was nasty!)

Now’s the time for clarity and sober thinking, so here’s hoping Fox and Sutherland don’t muck up a good thing. The final episode of 24 airs May 24th on Fox in the U.S., and Global in Canada.

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To the other end is Roger Ebert’s own blog on the cancellation of At the Movies, the show he and partner Gene Siskel started in 1975. Disney axed the syndicated show this past March 24th, and Ebert, ever the active soul, has plans to get a new show going.

Ebert describes the new project a bit, and he gives an elegiac tribute to his old beloved show in what may be the most dignified tribute to a series from which a host was ousted. (Ebert and co-host Richard Roeper ‘cut ties’ with Disney when the company wanted to revamp the show into Pablum, but it’s still a putsch orchestrated by a parent company.)

It’s the classiest thing I’ve read in a while, and I hope the new project becomes a reality, meeting all of the requirements in Ebert’s outline. What’s surprising is not that his aim to cover current, past, contemporary, classic, and indie work is daring; that’s exactly what he used to do with Siskel before roepertitis and pablumitis became incipient.

Film criticism has taken a good forty whacks to the head as media enterprises keeping gutting their permanent staff, so maybe Ebert’s project might bring some intelligence back to film review shows.

More editorial blather to follow.

- MRH

New TV Scores on CD

Just uploaded are a trio of soundtrack reviews from three fine composers:

- Sean Callery’s 24: Redemption (Varese), released in conjunction with Fox' DVD of the pre-season teleplay.

- Joe Harnell’s The Incredible Hulk: Prometheus, Parts One and Two (Five Jays Music), featuring the complete scores for this two-part arc.

- Bear McCreary’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (La-La Land Records), gathering music from Season 1 as well as material leading towards Season 2.

Coming next: two naughty films.

And imminent: book reviews of Lalo Schifrin’s Mission Impossible: My Life in Music, and Lalo Schifrin: Entretiens avec Georges Michel.



- MRH

Jack's Back

No, this isn’t about the 1988 James Spader-Cynthia Gibb Jack the Ripper thriller directed by Rowdy Herrington (whatever happened to him?), although I admit I’m curious to see it after twenty years since its pay TV broadcast.

24: Retribution marks the return of Jack Bauer, the most successful and engaging James Bond derivative ever created for TV, and it’s about bloody time Fox brought back the popular hero after a long, long absence. The winter ’07-08 writer’s strike killed the show’s chances of returning this past January, but after a number of factors were resolved, Bauer was smartly fitted into a standalone 2-hour TV movie that’s far more satisfying than the 6 or 10 minute teasers Fox tacked onto the DVD editions of each season’s DVD debut.

In prior years, the teaser gave us a hook at what was to come in January, but you have to wonder why someone didn’t figure a TV movie was an even better way to grab us. Oh, right. It costs more dough.

In any event, Retribution has Jack hiding out in a pseudo-African nation on the brink of civil war, working at a boy’s school under the protection of an old friend and ex-CTU agent. When the local rebels need more boys for cannon fodder, they head for the boy’s school, and Jack’s efforts to avoid a subpoena handed to him by a U.S. consulate official goes down the river, as the good solider he needs to save the kids, prevent a mini-genocide, and save his friend’s life.

That’s all I’ll say about the film because, while one can argue it’s two episodes edited into feature-length format, it’s also a complete tale that has Jack returning home just as a new conspiracy cover-up is underway prior to the swearing in of America’s first Madame President.

24’s writers have always pounced on topical news reports, and the timing couldn’t be better. Last year’s president was a right wing hardliner who almost launched a global nuclear war, and things in the country were resoundly bad. It was all post-9/11, which meant the show was set in a world where nothing could be trusted because of an omnipotent cloud of fear: nothing and no one could be trusted, and extremism was wrecking the sense of freedom and pursuit of leisure with which everyone had grown up.

If the story arcs work, 24 is essentially gripping, old-time serial tension. Season 1 was perfection in a bottle (amnesia idiocy excepted); Season 2 was less tight but still engaging; Season 3 had one good episode amid dumb peroxide characters jiggling their way through an ineptly run CTU; Season 4 had a half good episode amid wayward tangents and lame plotting designed to trick ardent fans that only made them angrier; Season 5 was shockingly pretty good; and Season 6 was 24 back in high gear. Kudos to those who realize the show was seriously sucking and needed medical help.

Retribution is timely because it’s riding on post-election euphoria over a the massive political and emotional shift from Dubya to Obama, and like real-life, occurs prior to the transition to the new administration. The world Madame President will govern has already started with a major crisis (the African civil war) as well as a standard 24 internal cover-up of bad behaviour (illegal arms sales) which could threaten not only her administration, but her efforts to be a popular President in addition to keeping her family safe. As prior seasons of 24 have shown, shrapnel knows no boundaries, and the devastation can include presidential family members, drivers, best friends, or whatever gets in the way of the lunatic fringe. All standard operating procedure for the show’s writers.

Retribution will debut Tuesday on DVD as a standalone release, and will be goosed with, what else, a teaser for the new season, although during Sunday’s broadcast, Fox showed some teaser trailers of the teaser (teasing, isn’t it?) that showed a very alive, albeit scarred, Tony Almeida, to which I can only scream “HOW THE HELL IS THAT POSSIBLE?!?!?!?”

For that, we’ll find out in January, after Xmas and New Year’s celebrations, and after Obama moves from elect to sitting President. Undoubtedly the show’s writers will try and feed off what they feel we’ll be experiencing around then.

Fans of the series will not be disappointed by Retribution, as it’s another star-studded episode of sorts with Robert Carlyle as Bauer’s friend in need, and Jon Voight plays the new selfish scumbag with eyes on perhaps rubbing out a member of Madame President’s close circle. Sean Callery’s score is another punchy mix of electronic rhythms, and the use of split-screens pops up a bit more than in prior seasons. (The effect was heavily minimized after Season 1, although I felt that season’s directors made good use of the feature, and I kind of miss it.)

Director John Cassar handles the tense action scenes with his usual panache for sharply edited mayhem, and he’s brought in another massive contingent of fellow Canadians, which include Gil Bellows (Keep Your Distance), Carly Pope (Young People Fucking), and Colm Feore (who’s American, but has made myriad appearances in Canadian stage, TV, and film productions, including Bon Cop, Bad Cop).

We’ll compact the above review with comments on the DVD’s special features (a screener wasn’t available at the time of writing, so I had to settle for the broadcast version which lacks 10 mins. of additional footage).

And how was the Simpsons’ 24 parody? Mostly meh. The show only came to life when Kiefer Sutherland popped up in the middle, getting a prank call (“Imade Adoody“) from Bart, which sets up the finale and a funny closing line. Most of the show’s gags dealt with bodily functions, odours, fetid yogurt, and Marge racing against time to make a worthy contribution to the school’s annual bake sale.

Meh.


- MRH