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This padlet will support the application of the uses and gratification theory as the foundational theoretical framework for 24; a tv series.

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This padlet will support the application of the uses and gratification theory as the foundational theoretical framework for 24; a tv series.

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An Investigation in the Framework of Uses and Gratification Theory

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An Investigation in the Framework of Uses and Gratification Theory

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Kişilerarası iletişim engellerinden biri olan stereotipler, genellikle kişilerin içinde yer aldıkları meslek grubu, eğitimi, yaşı, cinsiyeti, ırkı, hobileri, hastalıkları vb. konularda oluşturulmaktadır (Gürüz ve Temel Eğinli, 2011, s.288). Stereotip, bir grup insanın sosyolojik ve psikolojik olarak oluşan değişmez izlenimidir (Devito, 2004, s.100). Kişilerarası iletişim sürecinde stereotipler ... [Show full abstract]

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Bilgi ve iletişim teknolojilerinin gelişimiyle birlikte sosyal medya kavramı hem bireyler ve hem de kurumlar açısından popüler hale gelmiştir. Sosyal medyanın gücü ve interaktif bir ortam sağlaması müşterileri/tüketicileri güçlü bir duruma konumlandırmıştır. Günümüzde bu yeni bilgi ortamında ortaya çıkan filtrelenmemiş bilgi akışı, kurumsal itibar açısından tehdit oluşturabilmektedir. Bunun en ... [Show full abstract]

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(PDF) Interpersonal Communication in Social Networking Sites: An Investigation in the Framework of Uses and Gratification Theory

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PDF | On Apr 24, 2018, Aysen Temel Eginli and others published Interpersonal Communication in Social Networking Sites: An Investigation in the Framework of Uses and Gratification Theory | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

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Peter Orlik's Media Criticism in a Digital Age P.208

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Peter Orlik's Media Criticism in a Digital Age P.208

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An article that shows the significance of the show 24  

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An article that shows the significance of the show 24  

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For most of the history of television, the barrier to syndication-and to profitability-has been 100 episodes. The shows that have made it to that mark are an unusual group. Many were big hits. Some found small cult audiences. Still others just hung on as best they could and never posted numbers quite low enough to be canceled. In , we examine shows that made it to that number, considering both how they advanced or reflected the medium and what contributed to their popularity.

Quick. Name the last broadcast network series to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series? It's not , which won in 2005 for its first season then never again. It's not or , either, both series that attracted attention for their acting but not for the big prize. No, the answer is , which not only won a series trophy in 2006 but also brought home a prize for lead actor Kiefer Sutherland in the iconic role of Jack Bauer. Even more surprising was that 24 won that drama series Emmy-its first-for its fifth season. It's rare for a TV show to win its first series Emmy so late in its run, but 24 managed it for season five due to one simple reason: In 2006, 24 was probably the most influential show on the air, the perfect Venn diagram intersection between critical cachet and huge viewership, a show that was watched by just about everyone who wanted to keep up with what was important in the culture at large. It was, perhaps, the last time a network drama would hold that title.

Yet in 2014, 24 occasionally seems like an afterthought at best and a joke at worst. While working on this article, I asked a number of people the question that opens the above paragraph, and only a handful came up with 24 as the answer. That even extended to friends with copious knowledge of awards trivia, who often had to mentally comb through a couple of other shows before arriving at the right answer. Look at many of the series' rough contemporaries and the degree to which 24 has seemingly disappeared grows even more baffling. is still considered a key work to watch when understanding modern drama, while fans still endlessly debate the twists and turns of Lost. Series like and have only grown in stature since that time, and even soapy Grey's Anatomy continues to draw buzz for cast changeovers and occasional plot twists. But when was the last time you stumbled into a conversation about what the best season of 24 was? (The proper ranking, by the way, goes two, one, five, three, four, seven, eight, six.) Even as the series takes aim at a resurrection as a limited series with the debut of next week's , and even with a masterful publicity campaign for that show, it continues to feel like a series whose time has passed, despite being one of the most influential TV dramas that has aired in the last 25 years.

The reason for this is simple: Through essentially no fault of its own, 24 became a series not just about a man trying to stop terrorists, but also about the way America felt about the War On Terror. It was accidentally one of the most timely and relevant series of all time, debuting two months after massive terrorist attacks that inadvertently made its central premise (a man works to stop nefarious terrorist acts over the course of one exhausting day) seem less cartoonish and laughable than it had when creators Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran initially pitched the series. (At the time, terrorists were introduced as the main threat to play up the show's action movie credentials. John McClane fought ambiguously European terrorists in the Die Hard films, so Jack Bauer would do so on TV.) The show turned into an amazing amalgamation of the nation's worst fears about both external and internal threats, briefly segued into an anguished examination of the cost of battling those threats, and finally limped off the air in an era where all it had once stood for seemed increasingly suspect.

24, for better or worse, got inextricably linked to the administration of George W. Bush, and when he left office with low approval ratings, the show seemed to slowly deflate. It ran for two years of Barack Obama's presidency, but those years would see the ratings slowly slide and the series wrestle with how to approach its hero, a man who was willing to do anything to keep the country safe, even if it meant resorting to torture. In reality, 24 would grow much more troubled about the use of torture and its potential aftereffects on both the tortured and the torturer around the middle of its run-roughly after a roundly lampooned season-four scene that saw Evan Handler playing a buffoonish ACLU lawyer trying to stop Jack Bauer from violating a suspect's human rights. As recounted in Alan Sepinwall's terrific book The Revolution Was Televised, despite his conservative politics, Surnow increasingly found the torture scenes weak and repetitive as storytelling devices, while fellow producer (and eventual showrunner) Howard Gordon, who was more of a lefty, thought the series needed to tamp down on them in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandals. Either way, the damage was done: 24 was increasingly painted as a politically conservative show meant to prop up the Bush Doctrine, despite numerous scenarios in the series that functioned much better as left-wing nightmares. It wasn't just a show that featured torture; it was the show that supported torture.

Step away from the political arguments that came to define the show, though, and it's much easier to appreciate it as what Surnow and Cochran originally intended: an action movie, told in real time, over 24 episodes of television. The idea at first seemed less like an idea for a television show than a dare the two writers made to themselves. Could a single season of TV depict one tumultuous day in real time (leaving room for commercial breaks)? And could TV compete with the Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbusters that marked '90s action cinema? Notably, the terrorists of season one aren't Middle Eastern in descent. Instead, they're fighting an old war, with the season's Big Bad turning out to be a Serbian played by Dennis Hopper, angry at Jack Bauer and Senator David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert, as a character who would later become president) for atrocities committed in the Balkan wars. Here is a familiar story about the ghosts of wars past coming to visit the hero on his home soil. It has as much in common with John Rambo as John Ashcroft.

Step even further away from the politics, and the show's stunning influence on TV can be felt even more acutely. The real-time gimmick is about the only thing central to 24's appeal that hasn't been incorporated into the DNA of dozens of other shows. For instance, think of how often TV shows kill off major players who don't necessarily want out of their contracts nowadays. While 24 wasn't thefirst to do this, it was the first network series to really normalize the idea, as season one ended with the death of Jack's wife (who had been holding down her own plot line most of the season, complete with amnesia).

Significant time jumps between seasons are now largely de rigueur, but 24 also normalized this idea, starting season two around 18 months after viewers last saw Jack Bauer in season one. 24 also familiarized audiences with the concept of single-season storytelling, then went one better over other shows that had played in that sandbox: Between seasons, the cast would be revamped, sometimes entirely. So long as Jack was present (and, eventually, Mary Lynn Rajskub's Chloe), the show was free to completely ditch elements and characters at will, and it would prove astonishingly ruthless in doing so, giving it much of its appeal. There's not so very long of a distance between that concept and the limited-run anthology miniseries like and that have become so popular now. Hell, even the scheduling of 24 (starting with its fourth season) would become influential, as Fox went out of its way to program the show to run straight through from January to May, beginning and ending with blockbuster, multi-episode events. It was considered a huge risk at the time; now, the majority of heavily serialized shows are rolled out in this fashion.

Most importantly, however, 24 familiarized a mass audience with the idea of watching serialized drama. Unlike many of its descendants, it was incredibly easy to drop in and out of 24 at will. Every episode of the show boils down to a central mission or two, and that mission is usually wrapped up over the course of the hour. By breaking a macro-task down into many micro-tasks, 24 was always able to make larger stories more palatable to a larger audience. It also frequently ignored the rules of logic and common sense if it made for a better story. The show was written by the seat of its pants-and all the better for it. Famously, the assassination threat against Palmer that was to drive all of season one was dealt with in episode eight because the writers were tired of figuring out how to string the plot along. This led to things like Teri's amnesia and the later ludicrous story of Jack's daughter, Kim, facing off with a cougar, but it also led to masterstrokes like blowing up a nuclear bomb in the Southwestern desert two-thirds of the way through season two or revealing the president of the United States was a terrorist plant around the same point in season five. The show debuted at just the right time to familiarize audiences with these storytelling techniques. It was one of the very first series to have its first-season DVD set available before season two debuted, and it also turned into a show that benefited from early DVR usage.

24 was always a plot-driven series, but it possessed a unique talent for coming up with memorable characters who could be painted in the broadest of strokes. Jack was meant as a riff on action-movie heroes, but in the hands of Sutherland, he became a kind of unchecked American id, and the show was always richer when it understood that his methods, no matter the results they achieved, were often illegal and almost always unethical. That was part of his ultra-intense appeal, too. The show's debut two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks created a vacuum that a Jack Bauer type was always going to fill. 24 was only too happy to fill it. And yet it also acknowledged that he could go too far, and it surrounded him with archetypal good and bad guys, played by strong actors who understood all of this had just the whiff of camp. Loyal right-hand man Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), super hacker Chloe, ridiculous mole Nina (Sarah Clarke), treacherous President Logan (Gregory Itzin), and a host of others made each new appearance a delight.

Finally, 24 created a new kind of visual template for television that went beyond even its famous split-screen images. (Each episode ended with multiple characters' storylines reaching a cliffhanger point and shrinking into boxes that rested next to one another on screen as the series' omnipresent clock booped and beeped away.) 24 was informed by action movies, but its visual grammar had the feel of cinema verité and felt closer to Hill Street Blues, Homicide: Life On The Street, and some of the other great TV dramas dominated by handheld camerawork. The show's camera operators were encouraged to grab shots on the fly, and the kineticism of the camera operation became as much a part of why the show was exciting as anything else. Viewers weren't just watching Jack Bauer; they became unseen partners in his quest to protect the United States from those who would destroy it.

The most common answer to the question of why 24 succeeded so thoroughly is that it was the right show at the right time, the one show that could deal with terrorism at a time when it was on every American's mind, but in a way that made battling terrorism at least somewhat escapist. Yet the amount of potency drawn from that idea can only get a show so far, and 24 ran for eight seasons, 192 episodes, a TV movie, and a new miniseries. No, the fundamental reason 24 worked so well for so many people was that it acknowledged how much life in modern America had started to feel like living in the middle of a work of dystopian science fiction-then coded that idea very differently for viewers of all political persuasions. Terrorists frequently succeeded in carrying out plots more massive than September 11. The only way the government could stop them was to abandon all hopes of following proper protocol and lining up behind a man whose primary recommendation was that he was on our side and not theirs. And yet when the chips were down, the series also expressed incredible skepticism about the powers that be within the government. The true terrorist threats were rarely Middle Eastern in nature; instead, they were businessmen and war speculators and even the president himself. The key image of the whole series may come early in season six, as Jack watches a nuclear bomb explode in the Los Angeles suburbs. This wasn't the world viewers were living in, but it was one many felt they were hurtling toward. (The show, of course, abruptly forgot it had blown up Valencia.)

The show's best season, its second, speaks both to these strengths and the way they eventually became weaknesses. In it, terrorists are determined to blow up a nuclear bomb on U.S. soil, and the only way to stop them is for Jack Bauer to maim, murder, and torture at will. (In Sepinwall's book, Gordon points out that most of what Jack does over the course of the series is no different from what other big-screen action heroes had done over the years, but that conveniently ignores how much more time viewers spent with Jack than they did with any big-screen hero. That time has weight, and that weight increasingly comes down on the side of Jack's methods perhaps being impolite but getting results.) This second season has its issues-namely that cougar-but it's both 24 distilled to its most potent form and a reminder of how reactionary the show could seem. The whole scenario with the nuke seems directly out of memos written by the Bush administration to justify torture, to say nothing of tools of the dystopia that are still with us, like the PATRIOT Act or the NSA's PRISM program. But then, after the bomb blows up, the season turns on a dime and becomes about a nation ruled not by law but by profits, by men who would depose the president for standing in the way of a trumped-up war. Just when the series reached the heights of right-wing paranoia, it doubled down and became left-wing paranoia, a remix of American fears for both sides now and one that aired, notably, during the build-up to the Iraq War.

It's one of the inevitabilities of television that most shows will be stuck in the eras in which they are made. The medium is more susceptible to the whims of current production and fashion than most, perhaps because its speedy production time allows for influential programs to scatter their seeds far more rapidly. Yet one of the great curiosities of television is the way that certain American shows become weirdly linked to particular presidential administrations-and how they seemingly disappear with the leaders who marked them. seems like an essential part of Richard Nixon's America, and Family Ties and marked the Reagan and Clinton eras respectively. (If you're looking for the perfect Obama-era TV show, I suspect it will prove to be .)

The flip side of this is that immense popularity during a presidential administration coincides with a disappearance off the face of the Earth once that president leaves office (usually with voters none too glad to be done with him). And yet with time, the shows, if they're good enough, always come back. All In The Family made its way back into the conversation, and The X-Files is slowly winning back old fans, too. Our relationships to these shows, and the times that marked them, shift. Time heals all wounds. Watched in 2014, it's still hard to separate 24 from the political times that marked it, but it's becoming easier to do so. Soon enough, those times will seem like odd memories, and Jack Bauer will regain his primacy, headed back into the smoke to save us all over again, whether we like it or not.

Next time: Meet The Flintstones. They're a modern Stone Age family!

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24 revolutionized TV drama-then disappeared down a memory hole

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For most of the history of television, the barrier to syndication-and to profitability-has been 100 episodes. The shows that have made it to that mark are an unusual group. Many were big hits. Some found small cult audiences. Still others just hung on as best they could and never posted numbers quite low enough to be canceled.

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A great book about film criticism in the digital age 

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A great book about film criticism in the digital age 

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Why 'Designated Survivor' Is Already A Must-Watch Series For '24' Fans And Everybody Else

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Why 'Designated Survivor' Is Already A Must-Watch Series For '24' Fans And Everybody Else

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Designated Survivor hit television screens on September 21st, and electrified viewers in the first 10 minutes. Kiefer Sutherland, better known as Jack Bauer on 24, takes on a more sedate role as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a family man who never expected to be thrust into the role of the Commander-in-Chief. But a bomb takes out the Capitol and all parties in the line of succession to the presidency, and Tom Kirkman's (Kiefer Sutherland) life changes forever.

The first episode places Tom in the center of the Oval Office, but this isn't just a political drama. While the Kirkman family is shuffled to the White House, the FBI is looking for the terrorists behind the bomb. Add in a couple of malcontents who don't think Tom is capable of running the country, and Designated Survivor has set the stage for a can't-miss season. And as the series was just given a full season order, I'm looking forward to the twists and turns as the weeks unfold.

Designated Survivor has something for everyone, and you don't have to be a political junkie to enjoy it. But in case you're wondering if it will interest you, consider what it offers.

I was (and still am) a big fan of The West Wing, and watching Martin Sheen as President Bartlett often brought chills. He owned that role. He was the president. Kiefer Sutherland can't be President Bartlett - yet - but there were many scenes in the pilot proving he has the capability to be what the American people need. And we get to watch as this man who comes across a "don't make waves" type of person grows into a president that would make Jack Bauer proud.

If The West Wing, Madam Secretary, and House of Cards are the shows you enjoy, you should add Designated Survivor to your list.

After playing a government-trained assassin and the head of a detective squad, Maggie Q takes on the role of an FBI agent whose instincts tell her the danger to Washington, D.C., isn't over. The die has been cast for a season-long hunt, and with Agent Hannah Wells (Maggie Q) convinced the Capitol is only the beginning, Designated Survivor could gives us nail-biting mystery and intrigue. So fans of NCIS and Perception will most likely enjoy this series.

Deception

Not everyone thinks Tom Kirkman is up to the task of being president, and, in the pilot, a suspicious conversation takes place that opens the door to deception and betrayal. General Harris (Kevin McNally) makes it clear he thinks he would be a better leader of the free world in a time of crisis, putting the deputy chief of staff in a very untenable position. So if Scandal, The Good Wife and The Newsroom fit into your viewing schedule, you should probably give Designated Survivor a try!

In the pilot episode, we're introduced to Tom's family - a wife, a son and a daughter - and though it's evident love is there, we can already see trouble on the horizon. When Tom's son is tracked down by the Secret Service, he's in a bar dealing drugs. That's a job he can't keep as the president's son. Tom's wife is an attorney with the EEOC who is happy with her career, which begs the question: will she be able to retain her position or be forced to resign because of her new role?

Adding family to the mix heightens the stakes and is reminiscent of the family life on Madam Secretary. So if you enjoy family dramas, this is a show you want to check out. As an aside, Paul Redford is the co-executive producer for Designated Survivor. He was the consulting producer on Madam Secretary and the co-executive producer of The Newsroom and The Unit. That tells you the caliber of people behind this series.

So maybe you've read this far, and you still aren't sure if this show is something you would enjoy. I encourage you to give it a try. You can catch the pilot episode on Hulu and ABC.

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Why 'Designated Survivor' Is Already A Must-Watch Series For '24' Fans And Everybody Else

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Designated Survivor hit television screens on September 21st, and electrified viewers in the first 10 minutes. Kiefer Sutherland, better known as Jack Bauer on 24, takes on a more sedate role as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a family man who never expected to be thrust into the role of the Commander-in-Chief.

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eep, beep, beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeep. And so began every episode of 24. Kiefer Sutherland 's Jack Bauer was the hero of the hour - or rather 45-ish minutes, allowing for ad breaks. Events took place in real time, with each 24-part series depicting one nightmarish day in the life of the special-forces-soldier-turned-director-of-Los Angeles's-Counter-Terrorist-Unit (CTU).

We'd never seen anything quite like 24 before. When it first aired in the UK on BBC2 in March 2002 - it began the previous November in the US - 9/11 was very much on our minds. Our leaders told us of growing terrorist threats, warning that new laws would be needed for this changing terrain. While 24's first series didn't deal with Islamic extremism, subsequent series did and it tackled these concerns head on. We saw the good guys caught between a desire to keep their country safe and the pesky laws inhibiting their operations, while various plots played to prejudices or subverted them - see Marie Warner's radicalisation in series two. But it wasn't all torture and rightwing wish fulfilment - there was escapism, too. Liberals aghast at George W Bush's agenda found comfort in 24's David Palmer as well as The West Wing's Jed Bartlet.

For the most part, if you can ignore the crudely drawn stereotypical villains and expositionary dialogue, it was a rip-roaring ride; a show that leapt from one high-octane moment to the next. No plot twist was too severe, no character was safe.

By this point, we'd seen The Wire. We wanted something better

Back in 2002, it was still a novelty to see a star of Sutherland's calibre on TV every week. He wasn't the first, but he was at the start of a trend that saw A-listers migrate to long-running, big-budget series. And while the US audience were slow to appreciate 24, we loved it in the UK, with DVD sales strong enough to convince Fox to commission more episodes of a series they had planned to axe.

But somewhere along the line, 24 went bad. Not Nina Myers bad, but bad nonetheless. It was always implausible. Take Kim Bauer. Jack's ever-in-peril daughter was kidnapped three times in the first series. The second series saw her, for reasons too convoluted to go into here, stalked by a cougar, only to fall into the hands of a mad survivalist, played by Matt Dillon's brother Kevin.

But while 24 was often ridiculous, the tipping point came with series six. It took place several years in the future, with David Palmer's rubbish brother Wayne installed as president. The early plot saw Jack released from Chinese prison solely so he could be executed by a terrorist. But Bauer escapes (by biting through his captor's neck, no less) and shortly afterwards, kills a colleague, seemingly on a whim. No thanks.

No amount of getting Bauer back to basics in series seven could rescue 24. By this point, we'd seen The Wire, we'd seen Breaking Bad, we wanted something more cultured, more considered, more, well, better.

The brand was recently revived in the shape of 24: Legacy, but even a sexy overhaul and the combined heft of Jimmy Smits and Miranda Otto couldn't save it. Producers say another strand is in development and vow the franchise will live to see another hellish day, but let's leave it there. Some things, like Jack's ill-advised highlights in series one, are best left in the past.

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When good TV goes bad: how 24 became torturous viewing

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eep, beep, beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeep. And so began every episode of 24. Kiefer Sutherland 's Jack Bauer was the hero of the hour - or rather 45-ish minutes, allowing for ad breaks. Events took place in real time, with each 24-part series depicting one nightmarish day in the life of the special-forces-soldier-turned-director-of-Los Angeles's-Counter-Terrorist-Unit (CTU).

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It helps, of course, when those faces are so interesting to watch. From Day One-pun intended- has had impeccable casting, with a litany of hyper-talented guest stars including; Dennis Hopper, Powers Boothe, James Cromwell, Anil Kapoor, Jon Voight, and Kurtwood Smith. We can't forget Dennis Haysbert. Yet another example of the show's stunning cultural reach, Haysbert's charismatic, morally unimpeachable President David Palmer helped the American people get comfortable with an African-American as president of the United States. If there had never been a 24, it is entirely possible that Barack Obama might not have been elected-an irony surely not lost on the show's staunchly conservative creators.

Given a hyper-masculine drama, with a hero perpetually saving damsels in distress, 24 has also created surprisingly rich female characters-like Jean Smart's bathetic-cum-heroic Martha Logan and the majestic Cherry Jones as President Allison Taylor. The show's most crucial and innovative female character is, of course, the magnificently abrasive super-nerd, Chloe O'Brian, played by Mary Lynn Rajskub.

The closest thing Jack has to a sidekick, Chloe risked herself to help him countless times. What makes her unique, though, is Rajskub's note-perfect capture of a new American archetype-the tech nerd. A brilliant but socially inept computer whiz, Chloe O'Brian snaps for no good reason, pouts, whines, rolls her eyes and stomps. Her wardrobe is weirdly sexless. As is her walk-flat, short steps with hands to her sides like an eight-year-old boy. Yet, she is supremely talented, fiercely loyal, and a deeply sensitive soul. We love her. We root for her. Her surprise promotion to Acting Director of CTU three weeks back was not only a smart plot twist, it was very satisfying for an audience that knows she earned it.

The show exists, though, for Special Agent Jack Bauer; warrior, patriot, assassin, dreamboat. The first superhero of the 21st century, Jack is a hero with no mask, no cape, no James Bond tuxedo. His costume is anonymity; his wardrobe aggressively generic. Like Batman, Jack is a superhero without super powers. Where the Caped Crusader wears a utility belt, Jack carries the emblematic street accessory of our time-a laptop bag. Whatever weapons he pull from it, though, his most powerful tool is information-usually fed to his palmtop by Chloe. In an age when we are defined by the gadgets we carry and the information we get from them, Jack has the best network of all.

Interrogation and its discontents are undeniably a theme, but Bauer is more than a poster boy for water-boarding. The only truly annoying aspect of 24, in fact, is how often Jack spends five minutes screaming"Where's the bomb!" -or the virus, nerve gas, computer chip or whatever the MacGuffin happens to be-before the prisoner inevitably succumbs to torture. Jack's willingness to break the law, to act inhumanely to save human lives, is certainly a big part of his character, but he is no killing machine, no Rambo or Dirty Harry. Jack is interesting precisely because he cares. He becomes attached to people around him. Yet he is no dithering, sensitive guy, a la Tobey McGuire's Spider Man, either. He acts. He moves. He decides. He speaks only in declaratives, "Go now!" and "Get down!"-like Gary Cooper with anger issues.

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It helps, of course, when those faces are so interesting to watch. From Day One-pun intended- has had impeccable casting, with a litany of hyper-talented guest stars including; Dennis Hopper, Powers Boothe, James Cromwell, Anil Kapoor, Jon Voight, and Kurtwood Smith. We can't forget Dennis Haysbert.

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How  24 revolutionised the way we watch television today

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How  24 revolutionised the way we watch television today

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If you were to think back to what exactly it was that started the television epoch of 'binge watching', what would you point to?

2007, when now-household name Netflix went from a company that rented DVDs through the mail to starting up their own streaming service? Was it 2011 when the Game of Thrones craze saw families, friends and coworkers bask in the television-glow of the unending winter of Westeros? It is later, when in 2015 the Collins Dictionary named 'binge' the word of the year?

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Some believe it was long before any of those events, starting with the release of action-drama television series 24, which you can for free on 9Now.

Keifer Sutherland stars as Jack Bauer in 24. (9Now)

While the show - which tells the story of anti-terrorism agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and his fight against looming foreign threats to Americans' freedom and way of life - has been lauded for its innovative storytelling device of real-time narration (meaning that an hour of watching translated to an hour having passed in the diegetic universe), there was something else special about the way the story progressed.

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Unlike most television series in the late-20th and early-21st Century that were largely self-contained, each episode of 24 was a pivotal element to the overall series arc, with a single hour of progressive narrative being crammed into each seating.

So while you could miss an episode of your favourite soap opera and still be on track to enjoy the next the following week, each episode of 24 was crucial, and therefore unmissable.

The drama-filled series revolutionised TV action shows. (9Now)

In this way, and over a decade before streaming networks became the mainstream way to digest television, this seemingly run-of-the-mill, gun-toting drama revolutionised the way that we saw storytelling, focusing on the micro elements of a season arc rather than more macro, overarching narratives seen on Days of Our Lives or The Young and the Restless.

Just how did this show achieve the kind of cult following that found tuning in each week so mandatory? That was less of an innovative design, and more a matter of luck.

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The show's first season premiered on November 6, 2001 - only two months after what the world perceived as the most catastrophic incident of foreign terrorism: the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City.

Without even knowing it, showrunners and the series' writers had tapped into what would become one of the largest shifts in the cultural zeitgeist of the 20th Century: the fight against terrorism in defence of freedom.

With national security threats and the enormous financial, social and political ramifications of the 9/11 attacks, 24 situated itself within, and made itself companion to, the most significant global event of the times.

The show tapped into the cultural zeitgeist of early 20th Century America. (9Now)

This also meant 24 became immediately aligned with what became known as the war on terror, and the era of the George W. Bush administration. This meant that, ultimately, its relevance and importance in the cultural consciousness of American began to decay - if only implicitly - with the swearing in of Barack Obama and the new era of 'Yes We Can'.

While we can still watch Jack Bauer take out the bad guys and appreciate the seminal television tropes that brought us The Sopranos and The Wire, 24 was never considered prestige television, and was designated as 'irrelevant' after enjoying over 10 years of glory at the centre of the American zeitgeist.

That's not to say it isn't still a banger of a show.

Stream complete seasons of 24 for free on 9Now. A new season will drop weekly.

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How early-noughties drama 24 revolutionised the way we watch television today

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If you were to think back to what exactly it was that started the television epoch of 'binge watching', what would you point to? 2007, when now-household name Netflix went from a company that rented DVDs through the mail to starting up their own streaming service?

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Explanation of Uses and gratifications theory

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Explanation of Uses and gratifications theory

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Uses and gratifications theory asserts that people use media to gratify specific wants and needs. Unlike many media theories that view media users as passive, uses and gratifications sees users as active agents who have control over their media consumption.

Key Takeaways: Uses and Gratifications

Uses and gratifications was first introduced in the 1940s as scholars began to study why people choose to consume various forms of media. For the next few decades, uses and gratifications research mostly focused on the gratifications media users sought. Then, in the 1970s, researchers turned their attention to the outcomes of media use and the social and psychological needs that media gratified. Today, the theory is often credited to Jay Blumler and Elihu Katz's work in 1974. As media technologies continue to proliferate, research on uses and gratifications theory is more important than ever for understanding people's motivations for choosing media and the gratifications they get out of it.

Uses and gratifications theory relies on two principles about media users. First, it characterizes media users as active in their selection of the media they consume. From this perspective, people don't use media passively. They are engaged and motivated in their media selections. Second, people are aware of their reasons for selecting different media options. They rely on their knowledge of their motivations to make media choices that will help them meet their specific wants and needs.

On the basis of those principles, uses and gratifications goes on to outline five assumptions:

Media use is goal-directed. People are motivated to consume media.

Media is selected based on the expectation that it will satisfy specific needs and desires.

Media influence on behavior is filtered through social and psychological factors. Thus, personality and social context impact the media choices one makes and one's interpretation of media messages.

Media are in competition with other forms of communication for an individual's attention. For example, an individual may choose to have an in-person conversation about an issue instead of watching a documentary about the issue.

People are usually in control of media and therefore are not particularly influenced by it.

Taken together, uses and gratifications theory stresses the power of the individual over the power of the media. Individual differences mediate the relationship between media and their effects. This results in media effects being driven as much by the media user as by the media content itself. So, even if people take in the same media message, each individual will not be impacted by the message in the same way.

Uses and Gratifications Research

Uses and gratifications research has uncovered several motivations people often have for consuming media. These include force of habit, companionship, relaxation, passing the time, escape, and information. In addition, a newer body of research explores people's use of media to meet higher order needs like finding meaning and considering values. Studies from a uses and gratifications perspective have involved all kinds of media, from radio to social media.

TV Selection and Personality

Uses and gratifications' emphasis on individual differences has led researchers to examine the way personality impacts people's motivations for using media. For example, a study by the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University looked at personality traits like neuroticism and extroversion to see if people with different traits would identify different motivations for watching television. The researcher found that the motivations of participants with neurotic personalities included passing the time, companionship, relaxation, and stimulation. This was the reverse for participants with extraverted personalities. Moreover, while the neurotic personality types favored the companionship motive most, extraverted personality types strongly rejected this motive as a reason to watch TV. The researcher judged these results to be consistent with these two personality types. Those who are more socially isolated, emotional, or shy, demonstrated an especially strong affinity for television. Meanwhile, those that were more sociable and outgoing saw TV as a poor substitute for real-life social interactions.

Uses and Gratifications and New Media

Scholars have noted that new media includes several attributes that weren't part of older forms of media. Users have greater control over what they interact with, when they interact with it, and more content choices. This opens up the number of gratifications that new media use could satisfy. An early study published in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior on uses and gratifications of the internet found seven gratifications for its use: information seeking, aesthetic experience, monetary compensation, diversion, personal status, relationship maintenance, and virtual community. Virtual community could be considered a new gratification as it has no parallel in other forms of media. Another study, published in the journal Decisions Sciences, found three gratifications for internet usage. Two of these gratifications, content and process gratifications, had been found before in studies of the uses and gratifications of television. However, a new social gratification specific to internet use was also found. These two studies indicate that people look to the internet to fulfill social and communal needs.

Research has also been conducted to uncover the gratifications sought and obtained through social media use. For instance, another study published in CyberPsychology & Behavior uncovered four needs for Facebook group participation. Those needs included socializing by staying in touch and meeting people, entertainment through the use of Facebook for amusement or leisure, seeking self-status by maintaining one's image, and seeking information in order to learn about events and products. In similar study, researchers found that Twitter users gratified their need for connection through the social network. Increased usage, both in terms of the amount of time one had been active on Twitter and in terms of the number of hours per week one spends using Twitter, increased the gratification of this need.

While uses and gratifications remains a popular theory in media research, it faces a number of criticisms. For example, the theory downplays the importance of media. As a result, it may overlook the way media influences people, especially unconsciously. In addition, while audiences may not always be passive, they may not always be active either, something the theory does not account for. Finally, some critics claim that uses and gratifications is too broad to be considered a theory, and therefore, should only be considered an approach to media research.

Businesstopia. "Uses and Gratifications Theory." 2018. https://www.businesstopia.net/mass-communication/uses-gratifications-theory

Chen, Gina Masullo. "Tweet This: A Uses and Gratifications Perspective on How Active Twitter Use Gratifies A Need to Connect With Others." Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 27, no. 2, 2011, pp. 755-762. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2010.10.023

Communication Studies. "Uses and Gratifications Theory." 2019. http://www.communicationstudies.com/communication-theories/uses-and-gratifications-theory

Oliver, Mary Beth and Anne Bartsch. "Appreciation as Audience Response: Exploring Entertainment Gratifications Beyond Hedonism." Human Communication Research, vol. 36, no. 1, 2010, pp. 53-81. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2009.01368.x

Oliver, Mary Beth, Jinhee Kim, and Meghan S. Sanders. "Personality." Psychology pf Entertainment, edited by Jennings Bryant and Peter Vorderer, Routledge, 2006, pp. 329-341.

Potter, W. James. Media Effects. Sage, 2012.

Rubin, Alan A. "Audience Activity and Media Use." Communication Monographs, vol. 60, no. 1, 1993, pp. 98-105. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637759309376300

Ruggiero, Thomas E. "Uses and Gratifications Theory in the 21st Century." Mass Communication and Society, vol. 3, no. 1, 2000, pp. 3-37. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327825MCS0301_02

Song, Indeok, Robert Larose, Matthew S. Eastin, and Carolyn A. Lin. "Internet Gratifications and Internet Addiction: On the Uses and Abuses of New Media." Cyberpsychology and Behavior, vol. 7, no. 4, 2004. http://doi.org/10.1089/cpb.2004.7.384

Stafford, Thomas F. Maria Royne Stafford, and Lawrence L. Schkade. "Determining Uses and Gratifications for the Internet." Decision Sciences, vol. 35, no. 2, 2004, pp. 259-288. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.00117315.2004.02524.x

Weaver, James B. III. "Individual Differences in Television Viewing Motives." Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 35, no. 6, 2003, pp. 1427-1437. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(02)00360-4

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What Is Uses and Gratifications Theory? Definition and Examples

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Uses and gratifications theory asserts that people use media to gratify specific wants and needs. Unlike many media theories that view media users as passive, uses and gratifications sees users as active agents who have control over their media consumption.

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The office desk of Joel Surnow-the co-creator and executive producer of "24," the popular counterterrorism drama on Fox-faces a wall dominated by an American flag in a glass case. A small label reveals that the flag once flew over Baghdad, after the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003. A few years ago, Surnow received it as a gift from an Army regiment stationed in Iraq; the soldiers had shared a collection of "24" DVDs, he told me, until it was destroyed by an enemy bomb. "The military loves our show," he said recently. Surnow is fifty-two, and has the gangly, coiled energy of an athlete; his hair is close-cropped, and he has a "soul patch"-a smidgen of beard beneath his lower lip. When he was young, he worked as a carpet salesman with his father. The trick to selling anything, he learned, is to carry yourself with confidence and get the customer to like you within the first five minutes. He's got it down. "People in the Administration love the series, too," he said. "It's a patriotic show. They should love it."

Surnow's production company, Real Time Entertainment, is in the San Fernando Valley, and occupies a former pencil factory: a bland, two-story industrial building on an abject strip of parking lots and fast-food restaurants. Surnow, a cigar enthusiast, has converted a room down the hall from his office into a salon with burled-wood humidors and a full bar; his friend Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-radio host, sometimes joins him there for a smoke. (Not long ago, Surnow threw Limbaugh a party and presented him with a custom-made "24" smoking jacket.) The ground floor of the factory has a large soundstage on which many of "24" 's interior scenes are shot, including those set at the perpetually tense Los Angeles bureau of the Counter Terrorist Unit, or C.T.U.-a fictional federal agency that pursues America's enemies with steely resourcefulness.

Each season of "24," which has been airing on Fox since 2001, depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer-a heroic C.T.U. agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland-must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation. Terrorists are poised to set off nuclear bombs or bioweapons, or in some other way annihilate entire cities. The twisting story line forces Bauer and his colleagues to make a series of grim choices that pit liberty against security. Frequently, the dilemma is stark: a resistant suspect can either be accorded due process-allowing a terrorist plot to proceed-or be tortured in pursuit of a lead. Bauer invariably chooses coercion. With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.

The show's appeal, however, lies less in its violence than in its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the "ticking time bomb" plot. Each hour-long episode represents an hour in the life of the characters, and every minute that passes onscreen brings the United States a minute closer to doomsday. (Surnow came up with this concept, which he calls the show's "trick.") As many as half a dozen interlocking stories unfold simultaneously-frequently on a split screen-and a digital clock appears before and after every commercial break, marking each second with an ominous clang. The result is a riveting sensation of narrative velocity.

Bob Cochran, who created the show with Surnow, admitted, "Most terrorism experts will tell you that the 'ticking time bomb' situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week." According to Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the forthcoming book "Torture and Democracy," the conceit of the ticking time bomb first appeared in Jean Lartéguy's 1960 novel "Les Centurions," written during the brutal French occupation of Algeria. The book's hero, after beating a female Arab dissident into submission, uncovers an imminent plot to explode bombs all over Algeria and must race against the clock to stop it. Rejali, who has examined the available records of the conflict, told me that the story has no basis in fact. In his view, the story line of "Les Centurions" provided French liberals a more palatable rationale for torture than the racist explanations supplied by others (such as the notion that the Algerians, inherently simpleminded, understood only brute force). Lartéguy's scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societies-that their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats.

"24," which last year won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, packs an improbable amount of intrigue into twenty-four hours, and its outlandishness marks it clearly as a fantasy, an heir to the baroque potboilers of Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn. Nevertheless, the show obviously plays off the anxieties that have beset the country since September 11th, and it sends a political message. The series, Surnow told me, is "ripped out of the Zeitgeist of what people's fears are-their paranoia that we're going to be attacked," and it "makes people look at what we're dealing with" in terms of threats to national security. "There are not a lot of measures short of extreme measures that will get it done," he said, adding, "America wants the war on terror fought by Jack Bauer. He's a patriot."

For all its fictional liberties, "24" depicts the fight against Islamist extremism much as the Bush Administration has defined it: as an all-consuming struggle for America's survival that demands the toughest of tactics. Not long after September 11th, Vice-President Dick Cheney alluded vaguely to the fact that America must begin working through the "dark side" in countering terrorism. On "24," the dark side is on full view. Surnow, who has jokingly called himself a "right-wing nut job," shares his show's hard-line perspective. Speaking of torture, he said, "Isn't it obvious that if there was a nuke in New York City that was about to blow-or any other city in this country-that, even if you were going to go to jail, it would be the right thing to do?"

Since September 11th, depictions of torture have become much more common on American television. Before the attacks, fewer than four acts of torture appeared on prime-time television each year, according to Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization. Now there are more than a hundred, and, as David Danzig, a project director at Human Rights First, noted, "the torturers have changed. It used to be almost exclusively the villains who tortured. Today, torture is often perpetrated by the heroes." The Parents' Television Council, a nonpartisan watchdog group, has counted what it says are sixty-seven torture scenes during the first five seasons of "24"-more than one every other show. Melissa Caldwell, the council's senior director of programs, said, " '24' is the worst offender on television: the most frequent, most graphic, and the leader in the trend of showing the protagonists using torture."

The show's villains usually inflict the more gruesome tortures: their victims are hung on hooks, like carcasses in a butcher shop; poked with smoking-hot scalpels; or abraded with sanding machines. In many episodes, however, heroic American officials act as tormentors, even though torture is illegal under U.S. law. (The United Nations Convention Against Torture, which took on the force of federal law when it was ratified by the Senate in 1994, specifies that "no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.") In one episode, a fictional President commands a member of his Secret Service to torture a suspected traitor: his national-security adviser. The victim is jolted with defibrillator paddles while his feet are submerged in a tub filled with water. As the voltage is turned up, the President, who is depicted as a scrupulous leader, watches the suspect suffer on a video feed. The viewer, who knows that the adviser is guilty and harbors secrets, becomes complicit in hoping that the torture works. A few minutes before the suspect gives in, the President utters the show's credo, "Everyone breaks eventually." (Virtually the sole exception to this rule is Jack Bauer. The current season begins with Bauer being released from a Chinese prison, after two years of ceaseless torture; his back is scarred and his hands are burnt, but a Communist official who transfers Bauer to U.S. custody says that he "never broke his silence.")

C.T.U. agents have used some of the same controversial interrogation methods that the U.S. has employed on some Al Qaeda suspects. In one instance, Bauer denies painkillers to a female terrorist who is suffering from a bullet wound, just as American officials have acknowledged doing in the case of Abu Zubaydah-one of the highest-ranking Al Qaeda operatives in U.S. custody. "I need to use every advantage I've got," Bauer explains to the victim's distressed sister.

The show sometimes toys with the audience's discomfort about abusive interrogations. In Season Two, Bauer threatens to murder a terrorist's wife and children, one by one, before the prisoner's eyes. The suspect watches, on closed-circuit television, what appears to be an execution-style slaying of his son. Threatened with the murder of additional family members, the father gives up vital information-but Bauer appears to have gone too far. It turns out, though, that the killing of the child was staged. Bauer, the show implies, hasn't crossed the line after all. Yet, under U.S. and international law, a mock execution is considered psychological torture, and is illegal.

On one occasion, Bauer loses his nerve about inflicting torture, but the show implicitly rebukes his qualms. In the episode, Bauer attempts to break a suspected terrorist by plunging a knife in his shoulder; the victim's screams clearly disquiet him. Bauer says to an associate, unconvincingly, that he has looked into the victim's eyes and knows that "he's not going to tell us anything." The other man takes over, fiercely gouging the suspect's knee-at which point the suspect yells out details of a plot to explode a suitcase nuke in Los Angeles.

Throughout the series, secondary characters raise moral objections to abusive interrogation tactics. Yet the show never engages in a serious dialogue on the subject. Nobody argues that torture doesn't work, or that it undermines America's foreign-policy strategy. Instead, the doubters tend to be softhearted dupes. A tremulous liberal, who defends a Middle Eastern neighbor from vigilantism, is killed when the neighbor turns out to be a terrorist. When a civil-liberties-minded lawyer makes a high-toned argument to a Presidential aide against unwarranted detentions-"You continue to arrest innocent people, you're giving the terrorists exactly what they want," she says-the aide sarcastically responds, "Well! You've got the makings of a splendid law-review article here. I'll pass it on to the President."

In another episode, a human-rights lawyer from a fictional organization called Amnesty Global tells Bauer, who wants to rough up an uncharged terror suspect, that he will violate the Constitution. Bauer responds, "I don't wanna bypass the Constitution, but these are extraordinary circumstances." He appeals to the President, arguing that any interrogation permitted by the law won't be sufficiently harsh. "If we want to procure any information from this suspect, we're going to have to do it behind closed doors," he says.

"You're talking about torturing this man?" the President says.

"I'm talking about doing what's necessary to stop this warhead from being used against us," Bauer answers.

When the President wavers, Bauer temporarily quits his job so that he can avoid defying the chain of command, and breaks the suspect's fingers. The suspect still won't talk, so Bauer puts a knife to his throat; this elicits the desired information. He then knocks the suspect out with a punch, telling him, "This will help you with the pain."

Howard Gordon, who is the series' "show runner," or lead writer, told me that he concocts many of the torture scenes himself. "Honest to God, I'd call them improvisations in sadism," he said. Several copies of the C.I.A.'s 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual can be found at the "24" offices, but Gordon said that, "for the most part, our imaginations are the source. Sometimes these ideas are inspired by a scene's location or come from props-what's on the set." He explained that much of the horror is conjured by the viewer. "To see a scalpel and see it move below the frame of the screen is a lot scarier than watching the whole thing. When you get a camera moving fast, and someone screaming, it really works." In recent years, he said, "we've resorted a lot to a pharmacological sort of thing." A character named Burke-a federal employee of the C.T.U. who carries a briefcase filled with elephantine hypodermic needles-has proved indispensable. "He'll inject chemicals that cause horrible pain that can knock down your defenses-a sort of sodium pentothal plus," Gordon said. "When we're stuck, we say, 'Call Burke!' " He added, "The truth is, there's a certain amount of fatigue. It's getting hard not to repeat the same torture techniques over and over."

Gordon, who is a "moderate Democrat," said that it worries him when "critics say that we've enabled and reflected the public's appetite for torture. Nobody wants to be the handmaid to a relaxed policy that accepts torture as a legitimate means of interrogation." He went on, "But the premise of '24' is the ticking time bomb. It takes an unusual situation and turns it into the meat and potatoes of the show." He paused. "I think people can differentiate between a television show and reality."

This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind "24." Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming. At first, Finnegan-wearing an immaculate Army uniform, his chest covered in ribbons and medals-aroused confusion: he was taken for an actor and was asked by someone what time his "call" was.

In fact, Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show's central political premise-that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country's security-was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. "I'd like them to stop," Finnegan said of the show's producers. "They should do a show where torture backfires."

The meeting, which lasted a couple of hours, had been arranged by David Danzig, the Human Rights First official. Several top producers of "24" were present, but Surnow was conspicuously absent. Surnow explained to me, "I just can't sit in a room that long. I'm too A.D.D.-I can't sit still." He told the group that the meeting conflicted with a planned conference call with Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel. (Another participant in the conference call attended the meeting.) Ailes wanted to discuss a project that Surnow has been planning for months: the début, on February 18th, of "The Half Hour News Hour," a conservative satirical treatment of the week's news; Surnow sees the show as offering a counterpoint to the liberal slant of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."

Before the meeting, Stuart Herrington, one of the three veteran interrogators, had prepared a list of seventeen effective techniques, none of which were abusive. He and the others described various tactics, such as giving suspects a postcard to send home, thereby learning the name and address of their next of kin. After Howard Gordon, the lead writer, listened to some of Herrington's suggestions, he slammed his fist on the table and joked, "You're hired!" He also excitedly asked the West Point delegation if they knew of any effective truth serums.

At other moments, the discussion was more strained. Finnegan told the producers that "24," by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country's image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors-cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by "24," which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, "The kids see it, and say, 'If torture is wrong, what about "24"?' " He continued, "The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do."

Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, told me that he had similar arguments with his students. He said that, under both U.S. and international law, "Jack Bauer is a criminal. In real life, he would be prosecuted." Yet the motto of many of his students was identical to Jack Bauer's: "Whatever it takes." His students were particularly impressed by a scene in which Bauer barges into a room where a stubborn suspect is being held, shoots him in one leg, and threatens to shoot the other if he doesn't talk. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense. Solis told me, "I tried to impress on them that this technique would open the wrong doors, but it was like trying to stomp out an anthill."

The "24" producers told the military and law-enforcement experts that they were careful not to glamorize torture; they noted that Bauer never enjoys inflicting pain, and that it had clearly exacted a psychological toll on the character. (As Gordon put it to me, "Jack is basically damned.") Finnegan and the others disagreed, pointing out that Bauer remains coolly rational after committing barbarous acts, including the decapitation of a state's witness with a hacksaw. Joe Navarro, one of the F.B.I.'s top experts in questioning techniques, attended the meeting; he told me, "Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected. You don't want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems."

Cochran, who has a law degree, listened politely to the delegation's complaints. He told me that he supports the use of torture "in narrow circumstances" and believes that it can be justified under the Constitution. "The Doctrine of Necessity says you can occasionally break the law to prevent greater harm," he said. "I think that could supersede the Convention Against Torture." (Few legal scholars agree with this argument.) At the meeting, Cochran demanded to know what the interrogators would do if they faced the imminent threat of a nuclear blast in New York City, and had custody of a suspect who knew how to stop it. One interrogator said that he would apply physical coercion only if he received a personal directive from the President. But Navarro, who estimates that he has conducted some twelve thousand interrogations, replied that torture was not an effective response. "These are very determined people, and they won't turn just because you pull a fingernail out," he told me. And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. "They almost welcome torture," he said. "They expect it. They want to be martyred." A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. "They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory-the ticking time bomb will go off!"

The notion that physical coercion in interrogations is unreliable, although widespread among military intelligence officers and F.B.I. agents, has been firmly rejected by the Bush Administration. Last September, President Bush defended the C.I.A.'s use of "an alternative set of procedures." In order to "save innocent lives," he said, the agency needed to be able to use "enhanced" measures to extract "vital information" from "dangerous" detainees who were aware of "terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else."

Although reports of abuses by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have angered much of the world, the response of Americans has been more tepid. Finnegan attributes the fact that "we are generally more comfortable and more accepting of this," in part, to the popularity of "24," which has a weekly audience of fifteen million viewers, and has reached millions more through DVD sales. The third expert at the meeting was Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator in the war in Iraq. He told the show's staff that DVDs of shows such as "24" circulate widely among soldiers stationed in Iraq. Lagouranis said to me, "People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they've just seen." He recalled that some men he had worked with in Iraq watched a television program in which a suspect was forced to hear tortured screams from a neighboring cell; the men later tried to persuade their Iraqi translator to act the part of a torture "victim," in a similar intimidation ploy. Lagouranis intervened: such scenarios constitute psychological torture.

"In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence," Lagouranis told me. "I worked with someone who used waterboarding"-an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. "I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee's hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened." Some people, he said, "gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information." If anything, he said, "physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up."

Last December, the Intelligence Science Board, an advisory panel to the U.S. intelligence community, released a report declaring that "most observers, even those within professional circles, have unfortunately been influenced by the media's colorful (and artificial) view of interrogation as almost always involving hostility." In a clear reference to "24," the report noted:

Prime-time television increasingly offers up plot lines involving the incineration of metropolitan Los Angeles by an atomic weapon or its depopulation by an aerosol nerve toxin. The characters do not have the time to reflect upon, much less to utilize, what real professionals know to be the "science and art" of "educing information." They want results. Now. The public thinks the same way. They want, and rightly expect, precisely the kind of "protection" that only a skilled intelligence professional can provide. Unfortunately, they have no idea how such a person is supposed to act "in real life."

Lagouranis told the "24" team what the U.S. military and the F.B.I. teach real intelligence professionals: "rapport-building," the slow process of winning over informants, is the method that generally works best. There are also nonviolent ruses, he explained, and ways to take suspects by surprise. The "24" staff seemed interested in the narrative possibilities of such techniques; Lagouranis recalled, "They told us that they'd love to incorporate ruses and rapport-building." At the same time, he said, Cochran and the others from "24" worried that such approaches would "take too much time" on an hour-long television show.

The delegation of interrogators left the meeting with the feeling that the story lines on "24" would be changed little, if at all. "It shows they have a social conscience that they'd even meet with us at all," Navarro said. "They were receptive. But they have a format that works. They have won a lot of awards. Why would they want to play with a No. 1 show?" Lagouranis said of the "24" team, "They were a bit prickly. They have this money-making machine, and we were telling them it's immoral."

Afterward, Danzig and Finnegan had an on-set exchange with Kiefer Sutherland, who is reportedly paid ten million dollars a year to play Jack Bauer. Sutherland, the grandson of Tommy Douglas, a former socialist leader in Canada, has described his own political views as anti-torture, and "leaning toward the left." According to Danzig, Sutherland was "really upset, really intense" and stressed that he tries to tell people that the show "is just entertainment." But Sutherland, who claimed to be bored with playing torture scenes, admitted that he worried about the "unintended consequences of the show." Danzig proposed that Sutherland participate in a panel at West Point or appear in a training film in which he made clear that the show's torture scenes are not to be emulated. (Surnow, when asked whether he would participate in the video, responded, "No way." Gordon, however, agreed to be filmed.) Sutherland declined to answer questions for this article, but, in a recent television interview with Charlie Rose, his ambivalence about his character's methods was palpable. He condemned the abuse of U.S.-held detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, as "absolutely criminal," particularly for a country that tells others that "democracy and freedom" are the "way to go." He also said, "You can torture someone and they'll basically tell you exactly what you want to hear. . . . Torture is not a way of procuring information." But things operate differently, he said, on television: "24," he said, is "a fantastical show. . . . Torture is a dramatic device."

The creators of "24" deny that the show presents only a conservative viewpoint. They mention its many prominent Democratic fans-including Barbra Streisand and Bill Clinton-and the diversity of political views among its writers and producers. Indeed, the story lines sometimes have a liberal tilt. The conspiracy plot of Season Five, for example, turns on oligarchic businessmen who go to despicable lengths to protect their oil interests; the same theme anchors liberal-paranoia thrillers such as "Syriana." This season, a White House directive that flags all federal employees of Middle Eastern descent as potential traitors has been presented as a gross overreaction, and a White House official who favors police-state tactics has come off as scheming and ignoble. Yet David Nevins, the former Fox Television network official who, in 2000, bought the pilot on the spot after hearing a pitch from Surnow and Cochran, and who maintains an executive role in "24," is candid about the show's core message. "There's definitely a political attitude of the show, which is that extreme measures are sometimes necessary for the greater good," he says. "The show doesn't have much patience for the niceties of civil liberties or due process. It's clearly coming from somewhere. Joel's politics suffuse the whole show."

Surnow, for his part, revels in his minority status inside the left-leaning entertainment industry. "Conservatives are the new oppressed class," he joked in his office. "Isn't it bizarre that in Hollywood it's easier to come out as gay than as conservative?" His success with "24," he said, has protected him from the more righteous elements of the Hollywood establishment. "Right now, they have to be nice to me," he said. "But if the show tanks I'm sure they'll kill me." He spoke of his new conservative comedy show as an even bigger risk than "24." "I'll be front and center on the new show," he said, then joked, "I'm ruining my chances of ever working again in Hollywood."

Although he was raised in Beverly Hills-he graduated in 1972 from Beverly Hills High-Surnow said that he has always felt like an outsider. His classmates were mostly wealthy, but his father was an itinerant carpet salesman who came to California from Detroit. He cold-called potential customers, most of whom lived in Compton and Watts. Surnow was much younger than his two brothers, and he grew up virtually as an only child, living in a one-bedroom apartment in an unfashionable area south of Olympic Boulevard, where he slept on a foldout cot. If his father made a sale, he'd come home and give him the thumbs-up. But Surnow said that nine out of ten nights ended in failure. "If he made three sales a month, we could stay where we lived," he recalled. His mother, who worked as a saleswoman in a clothing store, "fought depression her whole life." Surnow, who describes his parents as "wonderful people," said, "I was a latchkey kid. . . . I raised myself." He played tennis on his high-school team but gave it up after repeatedly losing to players who could afford private lessons.

Roger Director, a television producer and longtime friend, said that he "loves" Surnow. But, he went on, "He feels looked down upon by the world, and that kind of emotional dynamic underpins a lot of things. It's kind of 'Joel against the world.' It's as if he feels, I had to fight and claw for everything I got. It's a tough world, and no one's looking out for you." As a result, Director said, "Joel's not sentimental. He has a hard-hearted thing."

Surnow's parents were F.D.R. Democrats. He recalled, "It was just assumed, especially in the Jewish community"-to which his family belonged. "But when you grow up you start to challenge your parents' assumptions. 'Am I Jewish? Am I a Democrat?' " Many of his peers at the University of California at Berkeley, where he attended college, were liberals or radicals. "They were all socialists and Marxists, but living off their family money," he recalled. "It seemed to me there was some obvious hypocrisy here. It was absurd." Although he wasn't consciously political, he said, "I felt like I wasn't like these people." In 1985, he divorced his wife, a medical student, who was Jewish, and with whom he has two daughters. (His relationships with them are strained.) Four years later, he remarried. His wife, who used to work in film development, is Catholic; they have three daughters, whom they send to Catholic schools. He likes to bring his girls to the set and rushes home for his wife's pork-chop dinners. "I got to know who I was and who I wasn't," he said. "I wasn't the perfect Jewish kid who is married, with a Jewish family." Instead, he said, "I decided I like Catholics. They're so grounded. I sort of reoriented myself."

While studying at Berkeley, Surnow worked as an usher at the Pacific Film Archive, where he saw at least five hundred movies. A fan of crime dramas such as "Mean Streets" and "The Godfather," he discovered foreign films as well. "That was my awakening," he said. In 1975, Surnow enrolled at the U.C.L.A. film school. Soon after graduation, he began writing for film; he then switched to television. He was only modestly successful, and had many "lost years," when he considered giving up and taking over his father's carpet business. His breakthrough came when he began writing for "Miami Vice," in 1984. "It just clicked-I just got it!" he recalled. "It was just like when you don't know how to speak a language and suddenly you do. I knew how to tell a story." By the end of the year, Universal, which owned the show, put Surnow in charge of his own series, "The Equalizer," about a C.I.A. agent turned vigilante. The series was a success, but, Surnow told me, "I was way too arrogant. I sort of pissed off the network." Battles for creative control have followed Surnow to "24," where, Nevins said admiringly, he continues to push for "unconventional and dangerous choices."

Surnow's tough stretches in Hollywood, he said, taught him that there were "two kinds of people" in entertainment: "those who want to be geniuses, and those who want to work." At first, he said, "I wanted to be a genius. But at a certain point I realized I just desperately wanted to work." Brian Grazer, an executive producer of "24," who has primarily produced films, said that "TV guys either get broken by the system, or they get so tough that they have no warmth at all." Surnow, he said, is "a devoted family man" and "a really close friend." But when Grazer first met Surnow, he recalled, "I nearly walked out. He was really glib and insulting. I was shocked. He's a tough guy. He's a meat-eating alpha male. He's a monster!" He observed, "Maybe Jack Bauer has some parts of him."

During three decades as a journeyman screenwriter, Surnow grew increasingly conservative. He "hated welfare," which he saw as government handouts. Liberal courts also angered him. He loved Ronald Reagan's "strength" and disdained Jimmy Carter's "belief that people would be nice to us just because we were humane. That never works." He said of Reagan, "I can hardly think of him without breaking into tears. I just felt Ronald Reagan was the father that this country needed. . . . He made me feel good that I was in his family."

Surnow said that he found the Clinton years obnoxious. "Hollywood under Clinton-it was like he was their guy," he said. "He was the yuppie, baby-boomer narcissist that all of Hollywood related to." During those years, Surnow recalled, he had countless arguments with liberal colleagues, some of whom stopped speaking to him. "My feeling is that the liberals' ideas are wrong," he said. "But they think I'm evil." Last year, he contributed two thousand dollars to the losing campaign of Pennsylvania's hard-line Republican senator Rick Santorum, because he "liked his position on immigration." His favorite bumper sticker, he said, is "Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism & Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything."

Although he is a supporter of President Bush-he told me that "America is in its glory days"-Surnow is critical of the way the war in Iraq has been conducted. An "isolationist" with "no faith in nation-building," he thinks that "we could have been out of this thing three years ago." After deposing Saddam Hussein, he argued, America should have "just handed it to the Baathists and . . . put in some other monster who's going to keep these people in line but who's not going to be aggressive to us." In his view, America "is sort of the parent of the world, so we have to be stern but fair to people who are rebellious to us. We don't spoil them. That's not to say you abuse them, either. But you have to know who the adult in the room is."

Surnow's rightward turn was encouraged by one of his best friends, Cyrus Nowrasteh, a hard-core conservative who, in 2006, wrote and produced "The Path to 9/11," a controversial ABC miniseries that presented President Clinton as having largely ignored the threat posed by Al Qaeda. (The show was denounced as defamatory by Democrats and by members of the 9/11 Commission; their complaints led ABC to call the program a "dramatization," not a "documentary.") Surnow and Nowrasteh met in 1985, when they worked together on "The Equalizer." Nowrasteh, the son of a deposed adviser to the Shah of Iran, grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where, like Surnow, he was alienated by the radicalism around him. He told me that he and Surnow, in addition to sharing an admiration for Reagan, found "L.A. a stultifying, stifling place because everyone thinks alike." Nowrasteh said that he and Surnow regard "24" as a kind of wish fulfillment for America. "Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business," he said. "It's a deep, dark ugly world out there. Maybe this is what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business-even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy."

In recent years, Surnow and Nowrasteh have participated in the Liberty Film Festival, a group dedicated to promoting conservatism through mass entertainment. Surnow told me that he would like to counter the prevailing image of Senator Joseph McCarthy as a demagogue and a liar. Surnow and his friend Ann Coulter-the conservative pundit, and author of the pro-McCarthy book "Treason"-talked about creating a conservative response to George Clooney's recent film "Good Night, and Good Luck." Surnow said, "I thought it would really provoke people to do a movie that depicted Joe McCarthy as an American hero or, maybe, someone with a good cause who maybe went too far." He likened the Communist sympathizers of the nineteen-fifties to terrorists: "The State Department in the fifties was infiltrated by people who were like Al Qaeda." But, he said, he shelved the project. "The blacklist is Hollywood's orthodoxy," he said. "It's not a movie I could get done now."

A year and a half ago, Surnow and Manny Coto, a "24" writer with similar political views, talked about starting a conservative television network. "There's a gay network, a black network-there should be a conservative network," Surnow told me. But as he and Coto explored the idea they realized that "we weren't distribution guys-we were content guys." Instead, the men developed "The Half Hour News Hour," the conservative satire show. " 'The Daily Show' tips left," Surnow said. "So we thought, Let's do one that tips right." Jon Stewart's program appears on Comedy Central, an entertainment channel. But, after Surnow got Rush Limbaugh to introduce him to Roger Ailes, Fox News agreed to air two episodes. The program, which will follow the fake-news format popularized by "Saturday Night Live," will be written by conservative humorists, including Sandy Frank and Ned Rice. Surnow said of the show, "There are so many targets, from global warming to banning tag on the playground. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit."

Last March, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia, joined Surnow and Howard Gordon for a private dinner at Rush Limbaugh's Florida home. The gathering inspired Virginia Thomas-who works at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank-to organize a panel discussion on "24." The symposium, sponsored by the foundation and held in June, was entitled " '24' and America's Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction, or Does It Matter?" Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who participated in the discussion, praised the show's depiction of the war on terrorism as "trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options." He went on, "Frankly, it reflects real life." Chertoff, who is a devoted viewer of "24," subsequently began an e-mail correspondence with Gordon, and the two have since socialized in Los Angeles. "It's been very heady," Gordon said of Washington's enthusiasm for the show. Roger Director, Surnow's friend, joked that the conservative writers at "24" have become "like a Hollywood television annex to the White House. It's like an auxiliary wing."

The same day as the Heritage Foundation event, a private luncheon was held in the Wardrobe Room of the White House for Surnow and several others from the show. (The event was not publicized.) Among the attendees were Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff; Tony Snow, the White House spokesman; Mary Cheney, the Vice-President's daughter; and Lynn Cheney, the Vice-President's wife, who, Surnow said, is "an extreme '24' fan." After the meal, Surnow recalled, he and his colleagues spent more than an hour visiting with Rove in his office. "People have this image of him as this snake-oil-dirty, secretive guy, but in his soul he's a history professor," Surnow said. He was less impressed with the Situation Room, which, unlike the sleek high-tech version at C.T.U., "looked like some old tearoom in a Victorian house."

The Heritage Foundation panel was moderated by Limbaugh. At one point, he praised the show's creators, dropped his voice to a stage whisper, and added, to the audience's applause, "And most of them are conservative." When I spoke with Limbaugh, though, he reinforced the show's public posture of neutrality. "People think that they've got a bunch of right-wing writers and producers at '24,' and they're subtly sending out a message," he said. "I don't think that's happening. They're businessmen, and they don't have an agenda." Asked about the show's treatment of torture, he responded, "Torture? It's just a television show! Get a grip."

In fact, many prominent conservatives speak of "24" as if it were real. John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped frame the Bush Administration's "torture memo"-which, in 2002, authorized the abusive treatment of detainees-invokes the show in his book "War by Other Means." He asks, "What if, as the popular Fox television program '24' recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?" Laura Ingraham, the talk-radio host, has cited the show's popularity as proof that Americans favor brutality. "They love Jack Bauer," she noted on Fox News. "In my mind, that's as close to a national referendum that it's O.K. to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we're going to get." Surnow once appeared as a guest on Ingraham's show; she told him that, while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, "it was soothing to see Jack Bauer torture these terrorists, and I felt better." Surnow joked, "We love to torture terrorists-it's good for you!"

As a foe of political correctness, Surnow seems to be unburdened by the controversy his show has stirred. "24," he acknowledged, has been criticized as racially insensitive, because it frequently depicts Arab-Americans as terrorists. He said in response, "Our only politics are that terrorists are bad. In some circles, that's political." As he led me through the Situation Room set on the Real Time soundstage, I asked him if "24" has plans to use the waterboarding interrogation method, which has been defended by Vice-President Cheney but is considered torture by the U.S. military. Surnow laughed and said, "Yes! But only with bottled water-it's Hollywood!"

In a more sober tone, he said, "We've had all of these torture experts come by recently, and they say, 'You don't realize how many people are affected by this. Be careful.' They say torture doesn't work. But I don't believe that. I don't think it's honest to say that if someone you love was being held, and you had five minutes to save them, you wouldn't do it. Tell me, what would you do? If someone had one of my children, or my wife, I would hope I'd do it. There is nothing-nothing-I wouldn't do." He went on, "Young interrogators don't need our show. What the human mind can imagine is so much greater than what we show on TV. No one needs us to tell them what to do. It's not like somebody goes, 'Oh, look what they're doing, I'll do that.' Is it?" ♦

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The office desk of Joel Surnow-the co-creator and executive producer of "24," the popular counterterrorism drama on Fox-faces a wall dominated by an American flag in a glass case. A small label reveals that the flag once flew over Baghdad, after the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003.

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Keifer Sutherland on The Tonight's show 

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Keifer Sutherland on The Tonight's show 

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Kiefer Sutherland Reveals the Origin of Jack Bauer's Damn It Catchphrase