TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS 2009a). Then there is the question of 24’s politics. Produced by

92 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS 2009a). Then there is the question of 24’s politics. Produced by

Republicans, it has featured cameos by their ideological confrères in politics ( John McCain) and the news media (Laura Ingraham and Larry Elder) and was endorsed by the intellectual lackeys of the Bush regime such as the ur- disgraced-academic John Woo, who wrote legal justifications for inhumane brutality (Lithwick 2008). The show’s creator, Joel Surnow, boasts of being a “rightwing nut job” (quoted in Aitkenhead 2009). The Heritage Foundation, a reactionary, coin- operated think- tank, held a press conference in 2006 in celebration of the series that featured Michael Chertoff, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, and extremist talk- radio host Rush Limbaugh, who announced that Vice- President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were fans of the program. 24 clearly endorses torture as a means of extracting information from terrorists, which has been a major ideological and policy distinction between US political parties since 2001. For some critics, it represents “la suma de los miedos americanos” [“the sum of American fears”] (Miklos 2008: 79). John Downing has termed the program “the most extended televisual reflection to date on the implications of 9/11” and an egregious argument in favor of the “need” for immediate and illegal action in the “public interest” (2007: 62). It’s fine for the hero, Jack Bauer, “a man never at a loss for something to do with an electrode,” to deny medical assistance to a terrorist whom he has wounded, shoot another’s wife in the leg, then threaten a second shot to the knee unless her husband confides in him; and fine for the US President to subject a Cabinet member to electric shocks to interrogate him (Downing 2007: 72, 77; Lithwick 2008) as Bauer endlessly intones, “Whatever it takes.” Similar questions of illegitimate process and authoritarian ideology have been posed of the CSI franchise (West 2008). A delegation

from the major US officer- training site, West Point, visited 24’s producers in 2007 to express anxiety that so many military recruits adopt illegal and immoral attitudes to torture based on their inter- pellation by the series, while interrogators reported a direct mimesis between the show and actual practices in Iraqi prisons by US forces inspired by the show. Human Rights Watch also weighed in. Yet

24 became the first carbon- neutral US TV drama in 2009, with offsets calculated against the impact of car chases, air travel, and use of coal- generated electricity, in addition to favoring wind and solar

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power. And its executive producer Kiefer Sutherland, the highest- paid TV actor in the world, is liberal in his politics, and disavows the notion that the program works ideologically at all – “it’s good drama. And I love this drama!” (Glaister 2009; Kaufman 2009; M. Miller 2007; Sutherland, quoted in Aitkenhead 2009). Thank heavens for Stella Artois’ Godardian spoof (www.guardian.co.uk/ media/2009/mar/23/stella- artois-nouvelle- vague).

Either way, for viewers in search of entertainment delivered not just via broad- brush ideology but also through form and style, high- end US TV had become the repository of many values tradi- tionally associated with art cinema – bravura montage editing, high- contrast yet subtle mise- en-scène, ellipsis and synthesis, direct address of a knowing audience, and stars chosen for the capacity to deliver lines over headlines. As the glossy, high- art inflected Latin American film magazine La Tempestad puts it, “el opio nuestro de cada día” [“our daily opium”] is offering “niveles altísimos de exi- gencia artística” [“the highest levels of artistic achievement”] (“La televisión y el futuro del cine” 2008). In the US, 24’s staple audi- ence was the most- educated and affluent demographic group (Sconce 2004: 99) – people not usually associated with the violence and anti- intellectualism of the program’s far- right producers and public supporters.

In terms of this kind of aesthetic valuation, one might argue that the move by several shows toward webisodes, which last about half the duration of the program that they accompany and are only available online, signals a trend toward gossipy ephemera, since they add value only to diehard fans because they focus on compar- atively insubstantial topics and characters. Or we could say that the trend makes artistic variations available to different kinds of viewers. In Australia, risky programming is tested through five-

minute online versions that can be watched while audiences are allegedly busy at work; they may turn into fully- fledged TV shows if they draw followers (Marcus 2008).