Rush Limbaugh defends "24" against charges of "shark jumping"

[NYCGirl]

Personally, I have to admit I've never watched the show. But I have Democratic friends who do.


http://www.tvsquad.com/2007/05/09/rush-limbaugh-defends-24-says-there-are-no-sharks-in-sight/

While critics -- and TV Squad commenters -- may be wondering if Jack Bauer's time has run out as ratings for 24 have dropped this season, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh defended one of his favorite shows saying that 24 has not jumped the shark.

Noting that the show's creators are friends of his who have been swamped with work, including other projects, Limbaugh told a caller who asked if 24's salad days were behind it, that he expects next season will be thrilling. "They're going to be back next year with an entirely different concept about this in a whole lot of different ways," Limbaugh said.

Acknowledging complaints from many fans (I'm raising my hand here) that Gregory Itzin and Jean Smart were wasted this season as the Logans were only given but fleeting screen time, Limbaugh urged fans, ". . . on't give up on it."

[underpants]

1. It's been getting trounced by "Heroes" and the CBS lineup

AS far as the show goes I watched the first two or so shows when it started and I watched the first show this season. I don't really have an opinion on it I just never watched the show.

I do have a comment on the preposterous idea that this is used as a talking point by the right-that the show's popularity illustrates that the American people approve of torture. Actually the whole thing only serves as more glorious self promotion by the talkradio crowd.

Savage and Beck both are huge fans.

[okieinpain]

2. well this season has really blown chunks. hope they do better next

year.

[myrna minx]

3. I tune into Heroes, but will record 24 to watch later.

After discussing the "story line" of 24 with my coworker, we both realized that we don't remember what happens from week to week. That told me that if I can't even recall what was on a program that I watched the night before, that I don't need to watch it at all.

[hlthe2b]

9. Yes.... the storyline seems now to consist only of

1. Kiefer in trouble trying to save the world; 2. Kiefer nearly killed; 3. Kiefer subjects terrorists, friends, family members to torture (he's not too selective); But, alas, just when you think he's failed, well, he's almost killed and a slim lead has appeared to move from this week's disaster to the next. Once in a while, the monotony is broken up by Kiefer's saving some damsel in distress, whose lust for Kiefer, sadly, will never be consumated. :eyes:

[myrna minx]

11. It does seems to have the silent movie melodrama formula to

it. Now if only one of those wily, mustache twisting, top hat wearing villains would tie Audry to a train track, then we'd be onto something.

[Horse with no Name]

32. Kind of like the Danielle Steele recipe

1. Find an exotic (or trendy) location.
2. Man and woman desperately in love.
3. One gets killed...the other one sure that they will never love again.
4. Unspeakable tragedy of poverty, illness, bad hair day befalls the remaining one.
5. Along comes a brother, cousin, best friend...take your pick on a white horse.
6. They find out that happiness and love can happen twice in a lifetime.
Rinse and repeat.

[Cha]

33. I watched it the first couple of seasons

..it was all different, but then it got real old. Always about those freakin' terrorists..get a life.

I know Keifer is a Dem and doesn't like what bush is doing to the country..and if they're glorifying torture over there on "24" then they better get a clue.

[Mz Pip]

4. I liked last season

but this season is just all over the place. Only two shows to go and I'll finish it out but haven't been impressed.

I don't know what an entirely different concept would look like. IT pretty much is what it is - 24 to solve a mystery, with lots of things blowing up, improblable use of technology and cell phones that never drop.

Maybe next season we'll get to see Jack take a nap for an hour.

Mz Pip
:dem:

[Matsubara]

5. I've never watched this program...

...and now I know I'm not missing anything.

Could it be that Donald Sutherland's son (or even Donald himself!) is a repuke? Say it ain't so!

[NYCGirl]

7. I have no idea what Kiefer's politics are, but Donald was a leading anti-war

protester during VietNam and a good buddy of Jane Fonda.

[hlthe2b]

10. Kiefer's no RWer... But, he's smart enough not to piss off

viewers of either political stripe, I think...

[MadBadger]

18. I believe Kiefer is a liberal.

[Monk06]

22. Keefer's grandad was Tommy Douglas, something he is very proud of.

[shenmue]

6. It was okay the first season.

Since then, I haven't liked it.

[Lobster Martini]

8. Maybe I'm missing the allure...

but the only continuity I can see in "24" is the notion that you can only stop terrorists by beating the tar out of everybody, including the people you work with, and speaking in a hoarse, inaudible whisper.

Thanks, but I'll watch the Simpsons.

[frylock]

34. freakin hilarious!!

that about sums up the show for me. I wacthed a full season at the behest of my roommate at the time. I'll never get that time back.

[zbdent]

12. If 24's ratings drop to the point of being cancelled, what will RWers

in their mommy's basements masturbate to?

[RL3AO]

29. 24 isnt a RW show.

Just because a co-creator is RW, doesnt make it a RW show.

[melody]

13. 24 turned into a crap soap opera this year

And they turned Chloe into a weepy soap opera heroine ... complete with fainting from
unwanted pregnancy.

Rush is his usual insane self. 24 died by suicide. They're the ones who thought this awful season would be "the best yet".

[trumad]

14. I use to love it and have defended it many times the last couple of years--BUT...

this season is plain goofy. Almost 60 seconds after Jack saves the world from the Nukes, the Chinese guy calls him and wants the chip from the nuke or little Audrey goes bye bye. Too funny.

[melody]

15. Same here ... Audrey alone was reason enough to stop watching

When they brought the schmuck (who must be one of the most irritating characters ever) back
to be the center of yet another season, I threw in the towel. The whole thing has become an
awful, awful farce.

[trumad]

24. She's the only character I condoned torture on that show.

Jack risking his whole career etc on her make no sense at all.

[melody]

28. It's ludicrous, as is she

I feel sorry for the actress, but about midway through Audrey's sniveling and screeching
act in season 5, I was wincing whenever she appeared on screen.

[Javaman]

19. exactly. it's days of our lives CTU style.

less jack more inner office stupidity.

I also love ability of the shows characters to bounce back from bullet wounds in just a few hours.

Milo gets shot through the arm (ever notice how all these people get shot but it never hits the bone) wears a sling for like half an episode then "two hours" later, he's just fine.

jack who has had bullet wounds, cuts and what appears to be broken ribs, runs, jumps and is still able to take out the bad guys.

I mean come on. at least in the past seasons, jack would at least nurse the would for the rest of the episode.

the writing on that show has gotten just down right silly.

Also, the completely over used beaten into the ground plot device that has to go if it thinks it's going to survive another season is: just when they have no more leads, poof!, something turns up. Nothing ever goes cold dead end on that show. Have them do some real detective work or have them try a new angle. I just am sick over how chloe is able to suddenly get a "piece" of garbled transmission for the terrorist de sure, with the exact clue they need.

Or just when you think everyone is finally dead, poof!, up turns evil badguy # 300 to screw up everyones day.

it's getting old, they need some new writers.

[trumad]

25. Hell---the English dude---Chloe's ex boyfriend, had a 3 inch drill bit stuck through his shoulder

2 hours later, he's typing 150 words per minute.

[melody]

26. Let's not forget Tony's rapidly healing brain surgery

In the old days, though, the show was so gripping, it was easy to forgive this
silliness. Now, it's just more lameness atop everything else.

[MadBadger]

35. What about his rapidly healing neck wound

Or Jack getting over his cocaine addiction in a day.

The worst is still David Palmer collapsing at the end of season 2, and never hearing about it really ever again, except in passing.

[Mike Daniels]

16. Resolving the terrorist storyline was the big mistake

They could easily have kept that storyline going through the full 24 by not killing off the former terrorist, delving deeper into who really was behind the assasination attempt and fleshing out the Philip Bauer and Logan story lines. .

One has to wonder why the writers even thought there was a demand for Audrey to return on any level.

[Forkboy]

17. As if I needed another reason to hate that dumbass,reactionary piece of crap show.

:puke:

[RamboLiberal]

20. I'm a 24 fan - but I too say it jumped the shark this year

Cause the writers followed the Bush plan - they had no plan - they admit they wrote the damn thing on the fly. Other seasons they got away with it, but not this one. I really think they got full of themselves and got lazy.

The writers on "24" always have lived dangerously, making up stories as they go along and somehow managing to pull it all together. This year, though, there's almost an air of desperation to the shifting plot, as if they've lost their grip on the show's essential appeal.

It partly may be a reflection that the post-Sept. 11 zeitgeist that attracted viewers to the show has started to dissipate. But the bigger issue seems to be that the writers let the story get away from them and have been trying frantically to get back on solid ground since that first nuclear device took out Valencia back in January.

The side story about Jack's family? Tossed aside, although reportedly it will resurface in the final episodes. Former President Logan and wife Martha? Back for one badly constructed episode and then gone. Turmoil and duplicity in the Oval Office? Been there, done that; pretty boring. And Audrey Raines, Jack's true love, coming back from China? Seems a desperation grab to hold on to viewers.

"24" still retains some of its strong points. There's been nothing wrong with the intense performance by Kiefer Sutherland as Bauer.

http://www.mercurynews.com/entertainmentheadlines/ci_5836393

[RL3AO]

27. They've always wrote 24 on the fly.

[Mike Daniels]

30. They brought back Jack's family and totally threw out what they already established

Primary case - Jack's father indicates early in the season that his (still un-explained) involvement with last year's assassination of Palmer was patriotically motivated.

Now, as he reappears in the show he's restructuring a nuclear component for the Chinese and previews for next week indicate that he plans to flee to China and leave this (in his words) ungrateful country.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if the writers even look at the earlier episodes before scripting the later ones.

[seemslikeadream]

21. Whatever It Takes The politics of the man behind “24.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_mayer



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.

[Imperialism Inc.]

23. That show puts me straight to sleep every time.

Right from season 1 on. My girlfriend watches it now but I just do other stuff because I'll be dead asleep by the end. I've tried about a dozen times and am 12 for 12 on not making it. Plus, I have always considered it basically terror terror terror propaganda anyway.

[Beausoleil]

31. I also have been a "24" fan

but after this season, I think I've decided that I can no longer watch it. I mean, come on, stop torturing us with all the torture. At least they seem to have gotten the message about that; not as much torture. But I think they're going to be hard pressed to come up with ideas since they've worn out nuclear attacks/explosions, bioterror, Chinese brainwashing and presidential assassinations/attempts. It really borders on fantasy now.
I thought I heard that this was Kiefer's last season anyway.

[DS1]

36. Sharkometer says yes

Let's see

spoilers below for those who videotape and watch later



**double-layered terrorist plot - been done
**someone in Jacks' family held hostage - been done
**CTU member dies - inside ctu - been done
**CTU attacked - been done
**jack gets information through torture - been done
**meandering subplot regarding president - been done
**Cloe pouts too much - been done
**approximately 14 miles worth of Jack Bauer crouch-walking with flailing gun-weilding arms - been done
**mole inside organization - been done