More On 24 (The New Yorker Backlash)

And speaking of 24, the New Yorker has a piece on the problems with the show's overuse of torture. It's a decent read, but one of those "is there really a point to this" sort of articles. I mean after all, I'm assuming most of us are smart enough to know 24 takes place in an alternative "ticking time bomb" reality, where all this moralizing about torture doesn't really apply.

In a way, this article reinforces the point I was making in my previous post - the realism I miss from the new 24 stems from how the newer plots play out, not the torture and not the ticking time bomb scenarios. There's a good rule in fiction that you can ask people to suspend their disbelief once, but after that you're probably asking for too much. Even most out of the box science fiction and fantasy asks you only to suspend your disbelief once, before building a world around that suspension of disbelief. In 24, the urgency of the 24-hour time frame and the accompanying nature of the ticking time bomb scenario is that suspension of disbelief.

Of course, as I mentioned in my last post, and was mentioned in the comments, the problem with the show this year is that not all of the character's actions and motivations seem to fit very well into the established 24 reality.