24 torture tactics?

Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled at the idea of 24 returning, even for just a 2-hour special. But it's such a tease. After the series being postponed because of the writer's strike last season and not airing at all, and now this 2-hour tease ("24: Redemption," set to air Sunday November 23), I really just want to see the actual series as it's meant to be seen.

Programming-wise, it's a good idea to get everyone remembering this show again. But is it really the show, if it's a self-contained 2-hour special? They claim that this sets the stage for what happens in Season 7. But part of what's so great about the show is the hour-to-hour urgency as you race through 24 episodes of craziness. The serial nature of the show is why we love it. Why tease me with 2 hours 2 months before the show actually starts?

Jack Bauer, you are breaking my heart. "There's no time!!!!"

Click to watch the trailer for 24: Redemption.

TV roundup

Hey TV fans. Just a quick recap of stuff I watched this week, stuff I read about today, and one special show I've just fallen in love with.

Notable stuff I watched:
- Gossip Girl. I'll preface this by saying that I feel some sort of six-degrees-of-separation type of thing with this show. First of all, they've been filming this all down 27th street in NYC, and they've done a week or so right by where I work. (Their wardrobe trailers were outside my building... and I accidentally walked through their breakfast tent one day and saw some of the beautiful gentlemen cast members. Hell yeah. One of them even glared at me! Be still my heart.) Secondly, my coworker's friend wrote the books the series is based on. Anyway, I've gotta say, this show was pretty smutty. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. A good way to sum it up is that while I never watched The O.C., I'm not surprised that it's by the same creators. But Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars) is the narrator, and I love her. And I think it really captures the culture of the teenage set these days - with the sidekicks and the texting and the blogs and whatnot. It's interesting to me from a cultural perspective, and I always love a little drama. It's classic CW/WB, so I'll be tuning in again.

- Back to You. It's hard to judge sitcoms by their pilots. I was a little disappointed by this show's premiere. I'd flag it as mediocre so far. But hey, I'm not giving up on it just yet. Who doesn't love Kelsey Grammar?! Plus, it reminds me of Murphy Brown, News Radio and Mary Tyler Moore. So I'll hang in there.


Notable stuff I read:
- Tony Almeda is returning to 24 this season! Maybe the plot lines, character development, and, oh, say, anything interesting at all, will return too. We can only hope.

- Insight on Pushing Daisies from Slate.com: "...anyone who's seen the Pushing Daisies pilot has to wonder: How long can the studio keep up that expensive look? The same question applies to the premise—guy touches dead people, they come back to life; he touches them again, and they die permanently. The girl of his dreams dies. So, guy loses girl, guy touches girl, guy can never touch girl again." We'll have to see how that plays out. I've thought from the beginning that this might be one of those shows that would make out better as a movie. But here's hoping.

- NBC's co-chairman Ben Silverman threw a pre-Emmy party that included girls in underwear and a tiger in a cage. Formal attire only. Assumedly that applies to everyone but the g-string-clad women. And the tiger. So... there's that.

- "How to Sound Like an American." This Slate video article investigates how all these British actors drop their accents to sound so utterly American. (House is the best example. Damn, he's good.)

My new love:

HEROES. Seriously, I missed out last season by not watching this. Now I understand what all the hype was about. It's so much better than I expected!!! It's everything I always wished Lost and 24 could be. And for someone like me, who loves reading novels, the fact that this plays out like a novel is fantastic. The writing is phenomenal, the characters are so complex, and the plot is revealed just enough at a time. And like my sister said, the story arc was planned from the beginning, so nothing that happens is an accident. Plus, I love superhero stories. So this is like my dream show. I am wondering, though, how this got scheduled in a 9pm time slot. It's pretty graphic, racy, dark, and scary. (Especially if you watch it with all the lights off and only candles lit, like I've been doing. Very "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark"-ish.) Anyway, seriously, watch this show. I always knew I'd like it, but I never knew I'd love it to the point of addiction, which is how I feel now. Season 2 starts Monday, but you should DVR it, Netflix the season 1 DVDs right now, and have a marathon over the weekend, like I'm doing, so that you can start watching season 2. (You definitely have to start with season 1.) I'm holding out hope that it won't lose momentum in season 2. This show is extremely powerful. And you know what they say... with great power comes great responsibility. Crossing my fingers that that means season 2 plays out just as fantastically as season 1!

Chloe! I need it NOW!!!

In the first four hours of the sixth day of 24...

-The U.S. government frees Jack from a Chinese prison only to hand him over to terrorists to be killed.
-Jack bites a terrorist in the neck (blood dripping down chin included).
-The guy who plays Taj in the Van Wilder movies and Kumar in "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" holds up a neighboring family at gunpoint while bleeding to death in their living room.
-Assasinated president David Palmer's brother Wayne is now president, and his sister Sandra is a senator/lawyer. (What are they, the Kennedys? Not that I'm complaining -- Wayne makes a much better president than that slimeball Logan last season. And I like that when he gets angry he speaks in quiet, low tones. Very nice. But nobody's as great as David Palmer. Not even his brother.)
-The guy who played quirky, stuttering John Cage on Ally McBeal has his Texan claws into Palmer and underhandedly tries to convince him to lock everyone with Middle-Eastern-sounding names up in some kind of Gitmo-like "terrorist detention facility." (He's been partially successful, too. And I fear he's only just begun.)
-Apparently Karen Hayes works in the White House now, and somewhere between seasons 5 and 6 she and Buchanan got hitched. (Better match than Michelle, I must say. Much closer to his AGE. Ahem.)
-Chloe's ex-husband Morris is back and working at CTU. His sauciness is much appreciated, since they've toned the now-brunette Chloe down a bit (boo) -- and hey, why is Milo back - and in a managerial position? Talk about nine lives. I liked him better as a pot-smoking peon. (OK, they never SAID he smoked pot. But I mean, come on.)
-Jack actually works WITH a former terrorist to catch another terrorist. Yes, you heard me right.
-Jack shoots and kills his friend and fellow CTU agent Curtis to protect the former terrorist guy. (Not as shocking as the deaths of Edgar, Tony and Michelle last season, but still. Nobody's safe on this show!)
-Oh, and Jack quits his job. (Not that I'm actually sure he was ever getting a paycheck.)
-And at the end of the two-night season premiere filled with bomb after bomb, the ultimate nightmare happened -- a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles County.

Talk about a jam-packed four hours. (And there's plenty I left out!)

I thought I'd be remiss if I didn't mention 24 in this little blog, since I know that some of my friends who occassionally read this like when I talk about TV -- and also like 24. I'm going to have a hard time waiting until next week to see what happens! (I've never watched it on TV before, only on DVD.) I'm very concerned that Jack was in the radiation zone of that bomb. I saw on the preview that he calls Buchanan up and un-quits his job. But I heard that Kiefer told Larry King in a recent interview that the show is well-equipped to go on without Jack Bauer. (Please! No!! Say it's not so!!!)

So what say you, 24 viewers? Will they kill off Jack at the end of this season? And I don't mean "kill" him, like at the end of most of the other seasons. I mean KILL him. Or will they be smart and either not have had him in the radiation zone or give him a miraculous recovery?

By the way, I agree with Entertainment Weekly that I am not looking forward to having to see the aftermath of the explosion. I've seen enough propaganda videos from WW2 and the Red Scare to know that I have no interest in seeing people's skin melting off of them and whatnot... here's hoping they keep it clean. Although they did have Jack very graphically bite someone to death just a few hours earlier.

And hey, you have to give it to 24 for going there. On basically every show that involves a nuclear attack, the attackers are stopped in the nick of time. 24 has never been afraid to have bombs go off (even in CTU), to have deadly gas permeate buildings, and to show bioterrorist threats fully executed, even at the peril of CTU's own staff. I guess that's part of the draw of the show. But I'm having trouble thinking of any show on TV at all that actually has had a nuclear attack happen.

By the way, if you're wondering whether or not I'm becoming more paranoid by the day, the answer's yes. But, as Charles Schultz says, "Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." I'm just hoping against hope that there's someone like Jack Bauer out there, biting people's necks and deactivating bombs and kicking ticking people through subway doors right as they push the trigger.