SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Conservatives who lament the
ideological bias in Hollywood need to stop acting like
liberals.
That’s the advice Joel Surnow, the executive producer of the hit
television series 24, gave to hundreds of conservative
students on Saturday at the Young America’s Foundation West Coast
Leadership conference.
“Our job is not to whine, that’s their job,” Surnow said. “Our
job is to succeed despite the adversity.”
Following the speech, Surnow sat by the patio bar of Fess
Parker’s DoubleTree hotel on a cool Santa Barbara afternoon with
his wife at his side, and elaborated further to a group of
conservative bloggers. He insisted that good material will see the
light of day in Hollywood, no matter what the political bent, and
pointed to productions such as 24, Path to 9/11,
and the movie 300.
Surnow recalled that when he first entered the business 35 years
ago, he was advised that, “if you write a great script, you could
drop it off a freeway overpass during 5 o’clock traffic, and that
movie will get made.”
The goal of developing 24 was not to make an explicitly
conservative show, but merely to entertain the audience with a good
storyline, Surnow said. However, in an age during which moral
relativism dominates popular culture, the series stands out for
embracing old-fashioned notions of right and wrong, and for
portraying its protagonist Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) as a
heroic figure for doing whatever it takes to protect his loved ones
and his nation. At a time when it has become culturally taboo to
portray radical Islam in a bad light, the show does not hesitate to
make Muslim terrorists the bad guys.
“Jack Bauer really represents justice,” Surnow said during his
speech. “This guy doesn’t care about the law, he doesn’t care about
the courts, he doesn’t care about consequences. He just cares about
getting the bad guy and putting him down.”
Surnow continued, “I understand all the legal eggheads who say
we can’t live in a society like that. I tend to agree that you
can’t have vigilantes running around, because eventually that could
lead down to a very crazy place.
“But in a world where there’s so much noise about what we’ve
done wrong, why we’re such bad people, there’s so little support
for just the real common sense idea, which is: they’re bad, we’re
good, we’re going to get them. Jack Bauer represents that. I think
the fact that he’s as popular as he is is encouraging.”
The television series is also at the cultural forefront of the
ongoing debate on the use of torture, because Bauer routinely uses
brutal tactics to obtain information from detainees, and critics
have argued that the show glorifies the practice. Surnow sees
things differently.
“In the context of our show, torture is like the only option,”
he said during the interview. “Does it glorify it? I don’t know. I
think it’s hard to watch. I think Jack Bauer has paid a horrible
price for having to do the things he does…. It’s always done with
the dark side attached. But we happen to believe that torture
works, in a very simple, simplistic, way. We believe that if your
kid was kidnapped and was about to be killed and you had the person
who could tell you where that kid was, that if you didn’t torture
that person to get information, that would be immoral and
irresponsible.”
Nonetheless, Surnow sees Bauer as a “tragic character” who has
been emotionally eviscerated over the course of his show as a
result of what he has had to do. He’s lost his wife, has been
estranged from his daughter, and imperiled everybody close to him.
This reality has made the show harder than ever to write, because
“There’s nothing for Jack to love or protect or care for
anymore.”
In a surprisingly candid admission, Surnow told students that
“From a creative standpoint, his story is close to over. But from a
business stand point, the show is in profit. They picked us up for
two more years, and we kind of have to find ways to keep his story
going without repeating itself. That’s what we struggle with every
day. Where does Jack Bauer go from here?”
The next season was supposed to debut in January, but will be
delayed indefinitely as a result of the Hollywood writer’s strike.
It transfers the main setting from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.,
where Bauer finds himself before a Senate Committee, and faces
possible jail time for his use of torture on enemy combatants.
There are also plans for a 24 theatrical movie, which
has already been written, but will only be made once the series is
over. It would all take place in real time over a 24-hour period,
but they’d skip over parts of the day to keep it to a feature
length. So, it may start with a 45 minute segment in London, then
skip several hours later to show somebody arriving in New York.
In the upcoming season, there will be a woman president played
by Cherry Jones.
“If she’s a really good character, she may help Hillary,” Surnow
joked. “So we may have to turn her into a bad character.”
Surnow said he would probably be supporting Rudy Giuliani, and
he asks, “Are we nuts thinking Hillary Clinton could be president
of this country?”
Asked about the battle over popular culture, he said that
conservatives should keep their heads up. “I happen to believe that
the MoveOn culture is going to have to implode at some point,” he
said, and also remarked that it is actually liberals who are
becoming more restrictive.
“To me, the liberal movement is old and repressive,” he said.
“If you want drinking, smoking, and red meat, you have to hang out
with Republicans.”
