Ira was a regular "24" watcher for a couple of seasons. I think she had (has?) a crush on Keifer Sutherland. I always found the show to be a complete waste of time. If its cartoonish villains and one-man-saving-the-world spy scenarios you're after, I'll take a Bond flick any day (preferably Roger Moore, who brought a welcome campiness to the role). Bond films are funnier, the stunts are better, and the ladies are, well, all right... Shaken not stirred, thank you very much.
By contrast, "24" takes itself far too seriously, Jack Bauer is too square, and most significantly, the show's pro-torture propaganda disgusts me. In Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency, Slavoj Zizek identifies the problematic aspects of the show, e.g. the tragic dignity it confers upon the torturer's perverse self-instrumentalization and the shameless way it openly condones torture.
Here's Zizek:
Therein also resides the lie of "24": The presumption that it is not only possible to retain human dignity in accomplishing acts of terror, but that when an honest person accomplishes such acts as a heavy duty, this confers on him an additional tragic-ethic grandeur. But what if such a distance is possible? What if we do have people who commit terrible acts as part of their job, while, in private, they remain loving husbands, good parents and caring friends? As Arendt knew, far from redeeming them, the very fact that they are able to retain their normality while committing such acts is the ultimate confirmation of their moral catastrophe.
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