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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The politics of the man behind “24.” (psst ... conservative) |
| 2007-02-09 |
| This is a long article, but a fascinating read! New show coming to Fox News on Feb 18, with hints of Rush backing. This is a good "over lunch" read ... if you are a "24" fan! WHATEVER IT TAKES The politics of the man behind “24.” by JANE MAYER Issue of 2007-02-19 Posted 2007-02-12 The office desk of Joel Surnow—the co-creator and executive producer of “24,” the popular counterterrorism drama on Fox—faces a wall dominated by an American flag in a glass case. A small label reveals that the flag once flew over Baghdad, after the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003. A few years ago, Surnow received it as a gift from an Army regiment stationed in Iraq; the soldiers had shared a collection of “24” DVDs, he told me, until it was destroyed by an enemy bomb. “The military loves our show,” he said recently. Surnow is fifty-two, and has the gangly, coiled energy of an athlete; his hair is close-cropped, and he has a “soul patch”—a smidgen of beard beneath his lower lip. When he was young, he worked as a carpet salesman with his father. The trick to selling anything, he learned, is to carry yourself with confidence and get the customer to like you within the first five minutes. He’s got it down. “People in the Administration love the series, too,” he said. “It’s a patriotic show. They should love it.” Surnow’s production company, Real Time Entertainment, is in the San Fernando Valley, and occupies a former pencil factory: a bland, two-story industrial building on an abject strip of parking lots and fast-food restaurants. Surnow, a cigar enthusiast, has converted a room down the hall from his office into a salon with burled-wood humidors and a full bar; his friend Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-radio host, sometimes joins him there for a smoke. (Not long ago, Surnow threw Limbaugh a party and presented him with a custom-made “24” smoking jacket.) The ground floor of the factory has a large soundstage on which many of “24” ’s interior scenes are shot, including those set at the perpetually tense Los Angeles bureau of the Counter Terrorist Unit, or C.T.U.—a fictional federal agency that pursues America’s enemies with steely resourcefulness. Each season of “24,” which has been airing on Fox since 2001, depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer—a heroic C.T.U. agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland—must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation. Terrorists are poised to set off nuclear bombs or bioweapons, or in some other way annihilate entire cities. The twisting story line forces Bauer and his colleagues to make a series of grim choices that pit liberty against security. Frequently, the dilemma is stark: a resistant suspect can either be accorded due process—allowing a terrorist plot to proceed—or be tortured in pursuit of a lead. Bauer invariably chooses coercion. With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets. The show’s appeal, however, lies less in its violence than in its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the “ticking time bomb” plot. Each hour-long episode represents an hour in the life of the characters, and every minute that passes onscreen brings the United States a minute closer to doomsday. (Surnow came up with this concept, which he calls the show’s “trick.”) As many as half a dozen interlocking stories unfold simultaneously—frequently on a split screen—and a digital clock appears before and after every commercial break, marking each second with an ominous clang. The result is a riveting sensation of narrative velocity. Continue reading for visit from the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, with who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country. And read for this: Surnow said that he found the Clinton years obnoxious. “Hollywood under Clinton—it was like he was their guy,” he said. “He was the yuppie, baby-boomer narcissist that all of Hollywood related to.” During those years, Surnow recalled, he had countless arguments with liberal colleagues, some of whom stopped speaking to him. “My feeling is that the liberals’ ideas are wrong,” he said. “But they think I’m evil.” Last year, he contributed two thousand dollars to the losing campaign of Pennsylvania’s hard-line Republican senator Rick Santorum, because he “liked his position on immigration.” His favorite bumper sticker, he said, is “Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism & Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything.” |
| Posted by:Sherry |
| #4 I've got that same bumper sticker on my car. And I live in Marin County. It gets some great reactions. |
| Posted by: remoteman 2007-02-09 19:17 |
| #3 That is a long read, but a good 'un. Thanks for the find, Sherry. I don't appreciate the slight at the troops in the article, though. A more subtle version of Kerry's the troops are dumb "joke." While I don't doubt that a few troops here and there *may* have watched 24 and "tried out" some of Jack's tactics for extracting info, I seriously doubt it's anywhere near the level of concern that the article makes it out to be. I think even "dumb" 18 year olds can separate fact (on the ground in Iraq) vs. fiction (24). |
| Posted by: BA 2007-02-09 13:27 |
| #2 Fascinating, indeed, Sherry. I look forward to Mr. Surnow's answer to Jon Stewart's Daily Show, which I find increasingly obnoxious. It is interesting, though, that the dean of West Point and professional interrogators who came with him to meet with the writers argued strenuously that physical torture is generally ineffective at extracting useful information, and that the repeated use of it on the show was making his job as an instructor of the future Army officers more difficult. We've argued about the use of physical torture here at Rantburg, too, and the point was raised that there are much more effective ways to elicit information, so effective that in some cases the subject doesn't even know that he's done so. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-02-09 13:14 |
| #1 Opppsss - forgot to give Drudge credit for this article find. |
| Posted by: Sherry 2007-02-09 12:02 |