February 15, 2008
24 loses its creator
Joel Surnow, the cigar-smoking conservative who created the series 24 has called it quits, leaving the show in the hands of more traditional Hollywood types, who are already promising to "reinvent" the series.
One suggested plotline: Jack Bauer goes to Africa as penance for the so-called crimes he committed against terrorists freedom fighters; he'll build villages and hospitals for the helpless natives, maybe work in a shelter or kitchen, too.
I'm not kidding.
Jason Apuzzo pays tribute to Surnow, as well as giving a well-deserved Bronx cheer to the way liberal orthodoxy has screwed up dramatic TV and film.
[T]he real reason “24″ worked so brilliantly was because Surnow has a unique sensibility that understands ideological purity is the death of drama.
Before Hollywood started working for al-Queda my biggest complaint with them was how left-wing cliches were killing films and television. Once you know how the simple liberal mind works — once you crack that code – you can see plot-twists coming from a mile away. Liberal purity has created more cliches and ruined more thrillers and action films than I can even begin to count.
I don’t know the man, but Surnow seemed to consciously understand that over the decades a liberal socialization had taken place with television audeinces which would allow him to create truly shocking plot twists by playing on what we’ve expected from liberal Hollywood for decades and then turning those expectations on their ear.
Black presidents torture? Torture works? The bad guys really aren’t white? A black first lady is the villain? The hippie kid really is a snivelling punk? The protagonist loves his country? The guy who played John F. Kennedy is torturing his own son because his country comes first? Terrorism is always a bad thing? Non-white people are terrorists? Guns do good? And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
There have been many complaints that “24″ wasn’t truly conservative. True. But again, that’s a good thing because ideological purity ruins drama. You never knew what was going to happen on “24″ because the the plot wasn’t beholden to any ideology and this freed the creators to keep the twists coming from any direction.
It was the same thing with Law and Order for the first five seasons. L&O wasn’t a conservative show then, what it was was illiberal, and therefore dramatic and intriguing because you never knew where it would end up. It’s unwatchable today, not just because of its political correctness and strident case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, but the utter predictability of the plots which come with all that baggage.
But Surnow’s understanding of how to twist the genre conventions didn’t stop at ideology. I knew “24″ was something special during season one when Jack’s wife agreed to be raped in her daughter’s place and then it actually happened. What a horrific and anguishing moment that was, and in any other show the rape never would’ve happened because we’ve become so socialized to the conventions of the genre we all knew the “good” bad guy would stop the rape (because we’ve seen it a hundred times before) or something else contrived would save this character we cared about from such a terrible thing. But she was raped and it solidified our sympathy making her death at the end all the more heartbreaking.
More importantly that moment told us all bets are off; anything can happen to anyone. It completely undermined our sense of security about the entire cast. Nothing was sacred. Nothing’s off limits. And that is drama.
I heartily second the slam on Law & Order; the last eight years have essentially revolved around the premise that the bad guy is always: the rich white guy; the evil corporation; the anti-immigration nuts; the gun nuts; and, of course, the conservative -- and naturally hypocritical -- politician.
It reminds me of what Hollywood did to Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears, a novel about Jack Ryan trying to stop a terror cell of Arabs bent on nuking the Superbowl.
This was in the days before 9-11, when Arab-American groups insisted that it was a gross stereotype to portray middle-easterners as the kind of thugs who would blow up buses, pizza parlors, hijack airliners, or saw the heads off kidnapped journalists or non-muslim captives.
Where would anyone get that idea?
So the studio caved and changed the identity of the terrorists in the film to -- get this -- German neo-Nazis with a big grudge from the way we dissed der Fuhrer.
Oy vey.
Shortly after the film's release, a bunch of German neo-Nazis Arab Muslim terrorists killed more than 3,000 people in Manhattan, perhaps undercutting that "stereotyping" argument.
The last couple of seasons of 24 lost their way a bit, with Fox insisting that the bad guys couldn't always be, y'know, Arabs. Thus, we had the evil, mysterious big business types conspiring to start a war for oil.
Sigh.
With Surnow gone, there's no hope that Jack Bauer will return to what he does best: slaughtering jihadis and South American druglords by the bushel.
Mores the shame.
Posted by Mike Lief at February 15, 2008 07:53 AM
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