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