Twenty-Twenty-Twenty Four Hours To Go. I Wanna Be Sedated.
It's times like these that I'm ashamed to have strident, unwavering and extremist political views. Because it is people like me that, from time to time, do their damnedest to ruin something fun for everyone else. This time, the target is television's "24."
The charges include collusion in PNAC's wet dreams and unfairly depicting Muslims as terrorists. I wonder if these people have ever watched the show.
TwentyFour is a hyperbole. Yes, threats to America are more dramatic on television than they are in the real world, and yes, jihadi salafist martyrs make pretty good boogyemen for American television viewers. That doesn't make make the show a neo-con Chick Tract. It is easy, though, to focus on a couple of hot-button ideas like evil brown men and dirty bombs, but that simplistic view ignores a great deal about the whole. For one, the show takes a dim view of preemptive military adventures. It takes an even dimmer view of large oil companies and Presidents who lie to the American people and claim extra-Constitutional powers. And just so we're clear, racism and religious intolerance are cast in a poor light as well. But to get to all that, you've got to actually watch the episodes, perhaps even an entire season, before making a judgment.
And let me be clear, I'm not saying that people shouldn't take entertainment seriously. After all, I'm writing my thesis on biker films, so it would be a bit hypocritical of me to say "meh, it doesn't matter." Television does matter. It reaches almost as many Americans as water, and what it says says a lot about the culture that makes and consumes it. Of course, what we read into our entertainment, and how we read it, says a lot about us as well. If we're going to examine ourselves, let's do it right, otherwise it's just trainspotting. Oh, and I wrote a couple of papers about TwentyFour a while back. Feel free to take a look:
British Culture and spooks
Family, Fear, Paranoia and Revenge in 21st Century America: A Cultural Analysis of 24
Labels: 24, criticism, television, twentyfour
4 Comments:
Alas, I have never seen 24.
~Joy
Having never seen 24 I should not comment, but when has ignorance on a subject ever kept me from waxing smart?
It seems as though 24 is a victim of its veiwership. Some people will always find fault with it just because it has a good cross-section of the right tingling in the crotch for it.
It's like Natalie Merchant, she's cool, but its her psycho fans that would just as soon kill you as look at you. It gives her a bad name.
Heh. If the critics would actually watch 24, they'd realize the only major propoganda on the show is pro-Fox...every major government office is tuned to FoxNews or the Fox affiliate, and in the first couple of episodes, the "terrorists" were watching CNN.
C'est la vie.
I watch 24 religiously, so to speak, and could not agree with you more. There is a difference between taking entertainment seriously and presumptuously hovering poised to censure, for God knows what particular reasons.
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