Fox's shameless televised brutality-orgy 24 is sorry about constantly torturing brown Islamic Muslims and their freedom-hating sympathizers for all those years, the TV show was just trying to fulfill America's revenge fantasies, sort of like the Iraq war. Fox has patriotically agreed to create a kinder, gentler 24, now that the war and president are unpopular, now that actors are shunning the show and now that even the toture-happy military has asked producers to just please stop. Its insane proposed plot changes, detailed after the jump, of course have nothing to do with the loss of 6 million brutalized viewers.

A flip-flopping effort to rework 24 from torture porn into, well, anything else has delayed the show, possibly until January 2009. The last season ended in May.

One plan hatched by guilt-wracked writers was to have Jack Bauer bravely race against time in Africa to nurture orphans, build homes for poor people, dig ditches and make TV commercials with Sally Struthers. For some reason Fox execs didn't go for that.

Another idea, called "Bad Jack," was to have the show openly acknowledge and confront Jack's deep-seated and probably unforgivable moral and professional failings. Since this was the only option containing a shred of human decency, Fox brass logically turned it down.

The plan now is for Jack to go to Washington DC, where he will bravely race against time to "address head-on the accusations that his tactics were out of line," which probably means putting Nancy Pelosi in some kind of stress position or jumping to the aid of a liberal senator whose daughter and wife have conveniently been kidnapped and are about to be raped and what are you going to do now, lefty?? Also, there will be a hot lady character thinking about whether she wants to be a torturer like Jack.


The only remaining problem for 24 is that no one wants to work there:

Two actors declined roles due to moral objections. One Muslim actor turned down a job as a terrorist. Another actor, the former "thirtysomething" star Dave Clennon, was threatening to turn down a role as the senator who would interrogate Jack at the hearing... "At the end of the day, my sense of the show is that it promotes torture and I don't want to be a part of that," he says.

[WSJ]