'24': Five questions with fallen FBI agent Rhys Coiro

And by fallen we mean compromised.

As one of Col. Dubaku's midlevel FBI moles, Sean Hillinger probably wasn't destined to go the daylong distance on Fox series "24." But actor Rhys Coiro, best known for playing the cocky "art-film" director Billy Walsh on "Entourage," says that at least in going bad Sean got to be really bad, killing his co-worker and mistress Erika (Ever Carradine) during a final lip lock.

When did you find out Sean was compromised?
It was after the writers strike. We stopped filming right before Sean turned. So then there was a big several-month break where I had no idea what his fate was or even what the show’s fate was. I mean, naturally, I had my suspicions, as does every actor on the show. But there had been some intimations. Janeane Garofalo and I, well, let’s just say there was talk of a conspiracy with us, but then it, uh, turned out to be only me!

Did you feel Sean‘s personal ticking clock kick in then? "24" has never had a problem offing characters. (As of tonight's episode, seven characters integral to the story have been killed.)
Well, we all knew that some twists were going to get even more twisted. It’s funny, I remember first starting out and Sean was something of a blank slate. But watching the show, he does seem like a suspicious fellow from hour one. I think he started out as sort of a red-herring character, and then he turned out to be, you know, the actual herring. I was actually driving in my car the other day through Hollywood and some guy pulled up next to me and was like, “Hey, you’re the bad guy on ‘24’! I thought it was gonna be you at first, but it was too obvious. I didn’t think it could be you.”

'24' pushed to 2009

One fallout of the Hollywood writers strike is that fans of Fox's drama "24" have to wait until next January to see Jack Bauer again.

The network has committed to air a full season on consecutive weeks and had been planning to start last month. If it had started airing new episodes of the Kiefer Sutherland action show soon, the season finale would not have taken place until the summer, when TV networks rarely show their high-profile programs.

A January 2009 start seemed the best way to comply with viewers' wishes that a season's episodes run without interruption to conclusion, Fox said Thursday.

From the Associated Press

Tony comes back to '24,' despite being dead

Perhaps it’s the “Ugly Betty” influence on television. Or maybe the producers of “24” just couldn’t get enough of Laura Spencer’s brief return to “General Hospital” last year.

When “24” has its seventh season premiere on Jan. 13, Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) will somehow be miraculously resurrected. We use the term “miraculously” because, even though executive producer Howard Gordon declared in a Fox news release today that Tony’s fate was “uncertain,” we’re pretty certain we saw Tony taking his last breath in Jack Bauer’s arms in Season 5.

This belief was further reinforced when we interviewed Gordon, Bernard and star Kiefer Sutherland, and they all expressed how sad they were that Jack no longer had his running buddy. But they all agreed that it was in the service of telling a good story.

What could that good story be now? According to Fox, the season opens with Jack on trial in Washington, D.C., for his actions in the pursuit of justice. CTU no longer exists and there is a woman, played by Cherry Jones, running the White House. The only thing stated about Tony’s return is that it is “shocking.”

'24': Jack calls it a day

Who could have predicted, with "Lost's" myriad mysteries still unexplained and "Heroes" just beginning to uncover the extent of its mythology, that the series with the most head-scratching moments this season would end up being "24"?

But that's how it ended up playing out, right up to the final ambiguous seconds of Monday night's two-hour season finale, with Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) standing alone on a Malibu cliff and staring off into the surf, possibly considering suicide, but considering Fox has renewed the series for two more years, probably not willing to act on it.

There's an argument to be made that Jack's closing stance was the perfect embodiment of the mental state of the writers at the end of "Day Six" -- lost, confused, unable to turn back yet unsure of how to proceed. Coming off the show's most uneven and critically condemned season yet, it's understandable they'd be a little shaken. This was the year that all the old tricks stopped working, when the show's reliance on torture came under attack from the media and co-creator Joel Surnow's conservative credentials were scrutinized. It's also the first season the series' basic 24-hour structure seemed to fail, when the writers decided to end the main storyline with six episodes to go, and grabbed at a few unresolved story threads from last year to fill the hours.

'24': Cut to the chase

With only one more episode to go in “24’s” uneven sixth season, it’s tempting to start the post-mortem early. Besides tying up loose ends and leaving us with the traditional season-ending cliffhanger, there’s not much one episode can do to reshape how the previous 20 played out. But since there are sure to be some surprises in next week’s two-hour finale -– and perhaps some hint at the new direction producers are planning to take the series next year -- we’ll look at the one element the series is still delivering just as effectively as ever: action.

After last week’s mini-version of “Die Hard,” this week brought a three-way struggle against the invading Chinese agents that finally allowed Nadia (Marisol Nichols) and Morris (Carlo Rota) to demonstrate that in CTU, even the office drones get hand-to-hand combat training. That was followed by a chase up to the roof of some sort of factory, in which Jack Bauer finally got his nephew (Evan Ellingson) back before being handed over to Jack’s dad, the eternally evil and scheming Phillip Bauer (James Cromwell).

In “24” terms, this was the equivalent of a summer blockbuster thrill ride. For all the talk of TV surpassing film in quality of characters and storytelling, one arena where the big screen purportedly still holds an edge is in big action spectacle. With its budget limitations and pacing considerations for commercials, nothing on network TV has approached the visual or technical complexity of, say, an extended Michael Bay car chase.

But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “24” may take liberties with the realism of how its government agents operate and just how much travel across Los Angeles freeways is possible during the length of a commercial break, but somehow the action feels just right. When violence happens, it happens quickly, is over more quickly and is usually punctuated by a whole lot of talking. It’s as if real-life criminals and cops learned their trade by watching it all on TV.

But a series doesn’t survive on action alone. While Jack was doing his thing over at CTU, acting President Daniels (Powers Boothe) was pacing around the Oval Office while his advisor Tom Lennox (Peter MacNicol) was out in the field, doing his best Jack Bauer impression by setting up Daniels’ chief of staff (Kari Matchett) for a sting on a Russian agent.

Boothe and MacNicol are great actors, and they’ve both had some fine moments this season, but sometimes the plot demands stretch their credibility to the breaking point. Take for instance the scene late in Monday’s episode in which Daniels, Lennox and another advisor take a break from a meeting of the Joint Chiefs to bat around a theory that Russia’s military generals are forcing their country into a war with the U.S. and then somehow take their late-night theory and turn it into the basis for policy.

It’s absurd to think that the President and a couple of advisors would get together and, without bothering to double check their conjectures, move forward with a plan of action. When the U.S. went to war in Iraq, there was careful … Well, maybe that’s another thing that “24” gets right, after all.

(Photo courtesy Fox)

'24': Dad's back

The lesson we can take away from Monday night’s episode of “24” (“2 a.m.-3 a.m.”) might be this: Ask long enough and eventually ye shall receive.

Finally, after weeks of begging and whining on the part of “24” fans everywhere (including me), the Powers That Be at the Fox series saw fit to give us the return of James Cromwell as Jack Bauer’s dad. He appeared only in the closing minutes of the episode, not long enough to make much of an impact this week, but his reemergence promises that the season’s closing episodes at least will feature some top notch villainy, if not wrenching Freudian drama -– one of the few elements of this season that hasn’t been recycled from “24’s” past.

It may be too late for Cromwell to single-handedly salvage this season -– that’s a task too monumental for any one actor –- but by circling back to this long abandoned storyline, “24’s” producers have at least put a big Band-Aid on the show and asked that we all come back in a few months to see if it got better.

'24': Time for a breather

For all those disaffected “24” fans shell-shocked like poor Audrey Raines (Kim Raver) in her torture-induced haze, wondering just how one of their favorite shows went so wrong, take heart! The Times’ own Scott Collins talked to “24” producer Howard Gordon in his Channel Island column this week, and he came away with some intriguing promises (read the whole thing here). Namely, the “24” we see next season may bear little resemblance to what we’ve seen this year, or any year previous. Big changes seem to be in Jack Bauer’s future, and for a show that’s starting to show its age, this can only be a good thing.

However, the re-tooled and re-touched “24” won’t be coming until sometime next year, and to paraphrase former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, you have to review the show you have, not the show you wish you had. So we’re left to pick through the scattershot remains of this season, one that started off so strong its nuclear mushroom cloud over the Santa Clarita Valley, but seems destined to end in some kind of murky haze of confused plotting.

'24': Love and counter-terrorism don't mix

For all those critics who fretted over “24’s” seeming lack of a social conscience, Monday night’s episode (12 a.m.-1 a.m.) could only have been good news. Here, finally, the show that glorified torture and made a mockery of due process was confronting a truly important life lesson: the danger of dating in the workplace.

Before the hour was up, the president’s advisor Karen Hayes (Jayne Atkinson) was forced to fire her husband, Counter Terrorist Unit chief Bill Buchanan (James Morrison); Morris (Carlo Rota) decided he could no longer work with his ex-wife, Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub); and Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) discovered that his girlfriend, Audrey (Kim Raver) had gone completely bonkers while in the custody of the Chinese.

Guess they should have tried Internet dating.

The only person who disregarded the lesson was Vice President Daniels (Powers Boothe) who, after being installed as acting President, seemed interested in making it with his chief of staff (Kari Matchett) in the Oval Office as his first official act. Considering that the last time he got the power, he tried to make a war with the Middle East, it’s possible making love was the only move he had left.

'24': Is Jack finally losing it?

It took awhile, about 18 hours to be exact, but on Monday night’s episode (“11 p.m.-12 a.m.”) Jack Bauer finally started to manifest the side effects of two years of torture in a Chinese prison.

How else to explain his cockamamie scheme to free his girlfriend Audrey Raines (Kim Raver) from the clutches of evil Chinese agent Cheng Zhi (Tzi Ma)? His idea, which he insisted on explaining to no one less than President Palmer (D.B. Woodside) himself, involved blowing up a vital piece of circuitry the Chinese were demanding in exchange for Audrey’s freedom, killing himself and any Chinese agent standing too close.

Why he couldn’t use a decoy circuit board or find some other, less suicidal way to save Audrey’s life was never discussed. As usual, Jack Bauer had decided on the only path to take and there was no time for rational discussion. When even Palmer balked at Bauer’s half-baked scheme, Bauer invoked the only thing that seems to carry more weight on this show than a platoon of counter-terrorism soldiers: his word.

'24': Can everyone knock off early today?

You mean that’s it?

Jack Bauer not only recovered the rest of the loose nukes in Monday night’s episode of “24,” but he also killed terrorist mastermind Fayed (Adoni Maropis), bringing an end to this season’s nuclear crisis. In the parallel story, President Palmer called off his own nuclear strike on the Middle East, revealing that his weapons were fakes all along.

As the conclusion to most of this season’s major storylines, it felt more than a little anti-climactic. It was expected, of course, but not last night, not so soon, and certainly not without enough buildup to make the whole thing emotionally satisfying. It felt as if the show’s creators had grown bored, and rather than try to salvage the storyline they’d been developing all season, decided to cut it off like a gangrenous arm. Unfortunately, they’re contractually obligated to deliver 24 episodes a season to us, and we still have seven episodes left to go. So what now? Will we finally get to the stuff longtime fans have really been waiting for, like seeing Jack duck into a restroom or grab a bite to eat?