Free Jack Bauer! by George Ziemann -- January 12, 2008 While I generally avoid the celebrity news, not to mention that I'm still busy trying to produce the recordings we made last weekend, I cannot help but wonder why Kiefer Sutherland has to spend more time in jail than Britney, Paris, Lindsay and the entire cast of "Lost" combined. I'm certainly not going to go look up details and compare events, blood alchohol levels or anything like that. I just know that Kiefer's was a misdemeanor drunk driving charge, which is no worse than anything the others did. There is no denying that Kiefer likes to party. Last year, Seth McFarlane sent him the only existing prototype to a Jack Bauer action figure, forgetting to mention the "only existing" part. Kiefer took the doll out drinking with a few of his friends and, before the night was over, had subjected the little Jack Bauer to rigorous CTU-type field-testing including being beaten, tortured and set on fire in the parking lot. And then there was the Christmas tree he tackled at some hotel, the restaurant no-pants incident and... Okay, Kiefer is just as bad as everyone else, which leads me to the only serious advice that this page will contain: Dear Famous People, We all love you, or at least some of us all love some of you. We realize that your profession requires that you work very hard when you're working, so we're not really surprised that you party hard when you're not. We expect you to drink, get drunk, and fall down. No problem. In fact, we need you to do shit like that from time to time to remind us that you're real people. We consider this just as entertaining as anything scripted that you do. We also know that, unless you've wasted it all, you're making a shitpile of money. Hire a fucking driver, you cheap bastard! Your friends, The Real World Back to Jack In this particular case, the problem is that Kiefer Sutherland is Jack Bauer. Jack Bauer is currently our nation's greatest superhero, loved by conservatives and liberals alike, which is almost a superhuman feat unto itself. If you're something of a neo-con, here's your argument for torture and lethal force in the name of the better good because the terrorists are here and WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME, dammit! The liberal sees someone who solves the problem of a corrupt and lying, conspiratorial administration by taking the only rational action a baseball, apple pie and motherhood loving, truth, justice and the American way sort of hero could be expected to do -- arrest the president and remove him from office. Jack Bauer can save the world in 24 hours. He's been in jail for 37 days, folding laundry or something. Meanwhile, the pop tarts are allowed to roam free, doing virtually nothing for the planet and not even capable of cooking an apple pie. It just ain't right. Then again, maybe he sneaks out at night, nabs a terrorist or two before morning and the black vans bring him back before daylight, just in time to do his kitchen duty serving breakfast. "You want toast with that?" "Man, what happened to you?" "Nothing happened to me. You want toast?" "Seriously, dude, your face looks like you got beat up last night." "Fell outta bed. No big deal." "It's got seven stitches in it. And they aren't prison stitches, either, cause if it was, you would've only got three." "Uh, the infirmary had a substitute doctor last night. He was new. Probably didn't know any better. Dude, you're holding up the line. Do you want some damn toast?" "And that 'little scratch' you had two weeks ago? Now that the bandage is off, it looks like a bullet wound to me." The inmate paused, pointed a finger at Jack and said, "I'm gonna be watching you, man." Jack looks at the finger that being wagged at him and, in a split second, grabs it and breaks it with an audible snap. "You want some fucking toast or not?" Back to Reality. Or Not. In case you're a 24 fan and were eagerly awaiting the premiere of the new season on Monday, be advised that it has been indefinitely postponed due to the writer's strike. This may even have something to do with Kiefer's jail time because he wasn't doing anything anyway except waiting for the strike to be over. Being in jail keeps him out of trouble. Personally, I miss Chloe. I also think that Jack Bauer and Chloe could have straightened out all the problems that Lincoln and Michael Scofield are dealing with in Prison Break, if only terrorists were somehow involved. This thought of combining shows is what I think the next generation of television should be, or at least it would if I were designing it. TV's current format of half-hour or one-hour shows crammed with commercials stopped being appealing a long time ago and there are more commercials than ever. I can barely stand to watch more than an hour a night, even if I have nothing better to do. Anyway, I'd like to see the television evening viewing fare progress to where each network has one program each night that lasts three or four hours and contains all the elements of all the individual shows, allowing each one to have continuously expanding and contracting story lines that interact with each other. Here's an example that I'm going to make up right at this moment, with no consideration to which networks do which show. The Sit-com Most sit-coms don't have an entire half hour of funny, so it would seem ridiculous to expand this idea at first. So put all the apartment-living sitcom characters in the same apartment building, which is in a neighborhood close to an urban area but quiet enough to be considered slightly suburban. All the house-based sitcom characters live in this neighborhood. The traditional transitions between shows are eliminated, as every encounter on the street, in a shop, or the apartment stairway is an opportunity to shift the focus between the elements of what were once separate shows. The Crime Show An ambulance brings a sick man to the ER. They guy has some bizarre complication that they can't diagnose, although they treat three other patients before arriving at this conclusion. They ship the sick guy over to that other hospital because maybe Dr. House can figure this one out. His staff visits the patient's house in search of clues, discovering another body. They call the police, readily available from several Law and Order precincts. After a thorough investigation, the CSI staff is brought in to do the forensic work, offering the interesting juxtaposition of strategy as both they and Dr. House's team race to identify whatever it is that they're trying to identify. Meanwhile, the detectives from several networks have followed clues found at the sick guy's house which have led them to a deserted farmhouse where two unmarked graves are discovered to have been unearthed. At this point, you get to call in Bones, the Behavioral Analysis guys from Criminal Minds, the small town cop from the sitcom show, Barney Fife, the girl from Ghost Whisperer, the vampire detective, or all of the above, depending on the story. If one of them is a sailor, you get the NCIS team, which is worth it just to see Pauley Paulette. If everything somehow ends up having something to do with deadly nerve gas and terrorists, it doesn't matter if House or CSI figures it out first, it's time to call CTU. Chloe will call Jack. Jack will not be answering his phone though, because they took it away when they put him in jail. Chuck Norris? He's busy campaigning for Huckabee. Who does this leave to protect the free world and catch the bad guys? Depends on how the writers' strike turns out.