Jack Is Back: Jack Bauer And "24" Returns To TV

Benji Wilson at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on the new season of 24.

After a four-year hiatus, Jack is Back. Which means 24, the real-time thriller in which Armageddon was averted eight times between 2001 and 2010, is back too. When Jack Bauer first appeared as a superhuman counter-terrorist agent in November 2001 a hashtag was a noise you made when you sneezed, terror was something you could declare war on and it was an article of note that the show featured a black president of the United States. Now Jack has his own hashtag, the War on Terror has “officially” ended and Barack Obama has been in power for five years.
 

The title of the new “event” series of 24 is Live Another Day, which in itself quietly concedes that this repeat performance is slightly unexpected (it was cancelled because of falling ratings). Kiefer Sutherland, the show’s star and executive producer, admits he had reservations about a resurrection: 
 

“I said, ‘Yeah, I’d absolutely like to do it,’ and then I spent the next six months petrified, going, ‘Oh my God, why would I open that up again?’ because I was nervous. I was very proud of everything that we had accomplished in eight years and there was something very satisfying about saying, ‘OK, it’s done.’ ”
 

But it isn’t done. And the new series has a twist. It’s set in London – complete with Stephen Fry as our own PM (rather improbably named Trevor). Once again Jack, now a fugitive from the US government, has to foil a plot to kill the American president, who happens to be in town. Some topical window dressing has been employed – where once the threat was thermonuclear now it involves drones; where once Jack’s long-term IT gopher Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub) was a government employee with a sensible haircut, now she has become disenchanted with politics, acquired a bob and gone to work for an Assange-style high-profile hacker.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10784964/Can-24-still-make-an-impact.html