Shooting postponed as major storyline gets dropped: Reports
Kiefer Sutherland says the next season of 24 will see his character, Jack Bauer, become “disillusioned with the government.”
24, GIVE OR TAKE A DOZEN: While in Brazil shooting a commercial for automaker Citroen, Kiefer Sutherland said that the next season of 24 will see his character, Jack Bauer, freeballing it a bit. “Bauer will be his own boss,” Sutherland said. “At the end of the sixth season he’s tired, disillusioned with the government and doesn’t want to have anything more to do with the presidency … He’s going to be on his own.”
Tired and disillusioned were the sorts of feelings most 24 viewers could share at the end of the last season, and production on the new season is looking pretty desperate, if you believe the news that’s been leaking while the show’s still prepping to start shoot. According to a TV Guide story from Monday, much of the plotline was scrapped when location shoots in Africa proved too expensive, and a back-up plan to try to get Los Angeles to stand in for Africa didn’t work out. (Frankly, the mind reels at how this might have been remotely possible – were they going to film on a few square feet of pavement in San Jose and green screen Lagos in behind?)
Fan-boys can relax with news that Chloe O’Brian, played by Mary Lynn Rajskub, will be returning for season seven – news that Rajskub says she only learned last week. “I don’t know what’s going on over there, but they’re going crazy,” Rajskub told Michael Ausiello of TV Guide. “We usually start (back up) at the end of July, and I don’t think we’re starting until a couple of weeks into August now. It’s kind of exciting, because I think (the postponement) means that they’re really having to dig in there and come up with new stuff.”
The Fox show is still set to debut in the new year, so it’s not quite time to panic yet, though you’ve got to hope that the tension is going to rub off on the finished product, otherwise we’d better start anticipating a day in the life of Jack Bauer, the new security guy at the Transamerica tower in San Francisco, trying to get off work in time to meet his buddy Chloe at Fisherman’s Wharf, where she ticks him off by gloating about her new job in the IT department at Pixar.
IS THAT A REMOTE IN YOUR POCKET…? The summer TV critics press tour started this week, and besides PBS’ typically earnest event at the Griffith Observatory, the early buzz is about a new HBO show that features explicit sex acts that may or may not be faked, though it sounds like nobody’s had the nerve to ask yet.
Tell Me You Love Me is part of the post-Sopranos HBO line-up, and features veteran actress Jane Alexander as a couples therapist, and Sonya Walger (Lost, CSI:NY) and Ally Walker (Profiler) as her clients. Rob Owen of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette saw the pilot, and it seems to have raised his eyebrows:
“There’s a scene of apparent penetration,” he writes on his press tour journal. “A woman (actress Sonya Walger, or possibly Ally Walker, I have trouble telling them apart and both are in this show) masturbates her male partner to completion and Alexander’s character appears to perform oral sex on her husband.” And so the line between mainstream entertainment and porn is worn every more threadbare.
