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ORIGINAL: Woger

Wouldn't it be safe to say that 24 became really big around series 4, so the most recent viewers won't have recognised alot of recurring ideas.

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ORIGINAL: Timon

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ORIGINAL: Woger

Wouldn't it be safe to say that 24 became really big around series 4, so the most recent viewers won't have recognised alot of recurring ideas.

I'd say Season 2 was just as big as Season 6 in terms of a nuke hidden in LA, president deciding whether to go to war, attempted coups, personal problems.....in fact it was the same as Season 6 just 100x better.

I liked how they shook it up in Season 3. Jack undercover for half the season, the move to Mexico, Jack's new partner in the form of Chase and the fact that Jack had a drug problem throughout that he was battling and trying to stop his colleagues and family from finding out about.

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ORIGINAL: Timon

They won't ditch the real time though. That's kind of what the whole show is built around.

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While in Brazil recently, Kiefer Sutherland gave a glimpse into the upcoming season of "24” and what his character, Jack Bauer will be up to. "Bauer will be his own boss, at the end of the sixth season he's tired, disillusioned with the government and doesn't want to have anything more to do with the presidency,” Sutherland said while in Brazil recently. "He's going to be on his own.” Sutherland was in country shooting an ad for Citroen.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19621265/

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ORIGINAL: FritzlFan

You organisational skills sicken me, Rhubarb.

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ORIGINAL: Timon

As everyone knows 24 is going to be back for two more seasons and possibly still a movie despite the lacklustre sixth season. Everyone who saw it knows it was repetative, slow, predictable, ever so racist and what was more shocking....dull. The thing it seems the producers may have taken note with the below article:

Is '24' running out of time?

JACK BAUER, America's favorite counter-terrorism agent with the violent code of honor and the weird sadomasochistic bent, is squaring off against a stealthy and unforgiving new enemy.

His fans.

After peaking in the ratings last year, Fox's thriller "24" has been getting dumped on by seemingly everyone in this, its sixth season. Critics and fans alike are aiming tomatoes at the stage, carping about the soapy and repetitive plotlines that unspool Jack's unlikely familial past, tiresome romantic triangles in the security bureaucracy and endless bickering among Oval Office advisors.

Last week, with a fresh episode designed to lay the groundwork for what the creators promise will be a typically suspenseful finale next month, "24's" ratings in the key young-adult category swooned to their lowest level in more than three years, with a total audience of just 10.4 million, according to figures from Nielsen Media Research.

More than one-third of viewers have bailed since the special four-hour season premiere that aired over two consecutive nights back in January. And if that wasn't enough bad news for the series, last week "24" was one of the prime-time shows that the Federal Communications Commission singled out in urging Congress to curb TV violence.

The vox populi protests have not escaped the attention of the show's producers, who promise that some big changes are on the way for Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) and other regulars next season. There's also speculation that something else might be at work in accounting for viewers' tune-out this season, but more about that in a minute.

"It hurts to hear the criticism," said executive producer and writer Howard Gordon, who spoke with me last week by phone as the cast and crew crashed to finish shooting the season's final episode, set to air May 21.

"I don't dispute it's been a challenging season to write for us. But it's reinvigorated our determination to reinvent the show. This year could be seen to be the last iteration of it in its current state."

Oh, dear. Reinvention? That does sound ominous. But Gordon says not to worry, as Jack "won't be flipping burgers."

"It won't be a musical or a half-hour," he added. "I've got a couple ideas, none of which I could even begin to share responsibly."

So "24" — the TV institution, to say nothing of the show's ongoing narrative — has at last arrived at a crossroads, and what an odd trip it's been.

Premiering less than two months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, "24" initially amounted to barely a blip on the pop-culture radar. The premise — each episode unfolding in real time over the course of a single day as Jack races to foil some dastardly conspiracy — sounded gimmicky. And given recent American history, Jack's missions against Middle Eastern bad guys could easily have struck too close to home. (As it is, the show has prompted plenty of complaints for propagating noxious ethnic and religious stereotypes; witness this season's major plot involving a diabolical terrorist overlord named Abu Fayed.)

But Fox stuck by the show, and, thanks in large part to the about-to-explode television DVD market, it steadily grew a fan base that finally made it blossom into true hit-level status sometime during the critically acclaimed and Emmy-winning fifth season.

I always loved "24's" willingness to work without a net, to go to crazy extremes in expanding the thriller format and somehow live to tell the tale — to outLudlum Robert Ludlum, as it were.

But two personal anecdotes brought the show's mass appeal home for me: My 70-something mother-in-law, a rock-ribbed Republican with narrow TV tastes outside of "The O'Reilly Factor," confessed that she never missed "24." And last year, while walking in downtown Burbank, I happened to observe a middle-age man take his female companion's hand and inquire, in a tone of voice at once soothing and conspiratorial, "What do you say we go home, build a fire and watch '24'?"

But the clock is ticking, for fans as well as for Jack Bauer. Longtime devotees are struggling to keep the faith during this trying season.

"The writers have recycled some plots this season that are glaringly obvious: a recording, an almost removed president, an assassination attempt on that president, an attack on a Middle Eastern country, an impending nuclear strike, a person close to Jack kidnapped, etc.," Victor Lana, a novelist who follows "24" for BlogCritics Magazine, wrote in an e-mail. But "the bottom line is that we still care about Jack Bauer."

Meanwhile, with apologies to my mother-in-law, "24's" audience is getting noticeably grayer, typically a sign that a show is losing its purchase on the windy crags of pop culture. According to Brad Adgate, senior vice president at the New York ad firm Horizon Media, the median age is 47.4 so far this season, compared with 45.1 last year and 42 in the 2003-04 season.

Those born with resistance to "24's" charms have noted that in the second and third seasons the show benefited from following "American Idol." Now, though, its scheduling is cutting the other way: In recent weeks the show's Monday lead-in was "Drive," a new cross-country caper that bombed and got yanked last week. (The network hastily replaced it with reruns of "House.")

"We had every hope that 'Drive' would be a good companion to '24' and successor to 'Prison Break.' We were wrong," Fox Entertainment President Peter Liguori told me, adding quickly that he nevertheless believed "24" would bounce back stronger next year.

But Gordon said he and his writing staff were wondering if something else was afoot besides the normal cycles of storytelling and network scheduling.

Could it be that the vague but gnawing post-9/11 fears that helped turn "24" into a hit are ebbing — the nightmares that envisioned great cities laid low by chemical weapons spilled into the water supply, say, or suitcase nukes wielded by shadowy assailants?

"It's something we talked about at the beginning of the season," Gordon said. "9/11 is becoming, quietly, a memory; the memory is starting to fade…. I do think that people are looking at the world differently, with less fear."

If so, that's probably good for America. And alas, that's probably bad for "24." Real-life political tension does wonders for creators of thriller fare. Look how kind the Cold War was to Ludlum and Tom Clancy.

Even so, Gordon sounds optimistic that "24" can recover from its annus horribilis and deliver the goods next season, no matter what changes are ultimately in store for the ever-suffering Jack Bauer.

"Certain tropes of the show will remain the same," Gordon said. "It'll keep its contract with the audience. We'll keep the adrenaline going."



So unless Jack is going after The Pope, they need to make this season smaller, more compact and more personal a la Season 1. And please, get it out of LA.

It's now several months later and pre-production is warming up for Jack's return. It's not going smoothly though.

It turns out there are delays due to location problems.

Season 7 of 24 promises to be its most tense yet. At least on the set.

Execs at the Fox hit have scrapped virtually their entire story line for the season, delaying the start of production by roughly three weeks. According to sources, the 11th-hour time-out was called after the network put the kibosh on a costly plan to shoot a number of episodes in Africa. Producers briefly toyed with the idea of finding a location in Los Angeles that could sub for the continent, but they ultimately decided to ditch the whole concept and start over from scratch.

Although a 20th Century Fox spokesperson declined to comment, 24's expert scowler, Mary Lynn Rajskub, confirms that the clock for Day 7 has been reset. "I don't know what's going on over there, but they're going crazy," says the scene-stealer, who only learned last week that Chloe would even be returning. "We usually start [back up] at the end of July, and I don't think we're starting until a couple of weeks into August now. It's kind of exciting, because I think [the postponement] means that they're really having to dig in there and come up with new stuff."

The show's creative team was no doubt already feeling the pressure: Day 6 was considered to be about as explosive as a wet firecracker, so for Season 7 they really needed a plot that was incendiary. In fact, news of the setback comes on the same day the semiannual Television Week critics' poll (in which yours truly participated) named 24 the second worst show on TV, behind ABC's best-not-traveled October Road.

For more on 24's big rewrite — including what impact it'll have on plans to introduce the show's first female president — check out Ask Ausiello this Wednesday.

Oh yes, that's right. Chloe is returning and the new President will be female. I assume Wayne died. Doesn't bode well however for a smaller, more personal story if we're having a problem at The White House.......