Female president next for Fox's '24'
The United States will have a female president next year -- on the Fox TV series "24."
Tony Award-winning actress Cherry Jones will play President Allison Taylor when the show about the exploits of counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) returns in January for its seventh season, the network announced Sunday.
Jones' term will coincide with Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential bid, but Fox Entertainment Chairman Peter Liguori said fiction and real-world politics will not intersect.
"It's a dramatic decision. ... The president is a very important piece of '24," Liguori told The Associated Press. "We've had a broad array of presidents on the show; why not a female president?"
The series has been an Oval Office groundbreaker before, with Dennis Haysbert playing President Palmer, the nation's first black president.
Asked whether Fox would scrutinize scripts for potential election-year political content, Liguori said that, as with any show, "24" will be looked at "from a dramaturgical perspective, not a political perspective."
Series co-creators Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran and fellow executive producer Howard Gordon have always kept real-life politics from the show, he said.
"'24' took place in an election year in the past," Liguori said. "How you see Joel, Bob and Howard articulate drama is telling on how they deal with politics. The two are separated."
In a February article in The New Yorker magazine, Surnow described himself as a rare conservative in Hollywood. But show producers say they hold a variety of political viewpoints and deny "24" takes a solely conservative approach, the magazine reported.
Jones, winner of best-actress Tony Awards for "The Heiress" and "Doubt," has appeared in films including "Ocean's Twelve" and "The Perfect Storm" and has guest-starred on TV shows including the White House drama "The West Wing."
Liguori and newly appointed Fox programming chief Kevin Reilly appeared Sunday at the summer meeting of the Television Critics Association to discuss the upcoming TV season on Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
Liguori said he wouldn't call the past season "disappointing," when asked about the fact that "24" failed to gain a best drama series Emmy nomination last week after winning the award in 2006.
He said he admires the "creative courage" of the producers as the show "re-sets the table each season" with a new story. "It's fun to see them spit-ball ideas," Liguori added.
24 Plot Tossed, Production Delayed
Season 7 of 24 promises to be its most tense yet. At least on the set.
Execs at the Fox hit have scrapped virtually their entire story line for the season, delaying the start of production by roughly three weeks. According to sources, the 11th-hour time-out was called after the network put the kibosh on a costly plan to shoot a number of episodes in Africa. Producers briefly toyed with the idea of finding a location in Los Angeles that could sub for the continent, but they ultimately decided to ditch the whole concept and start over from scratch.
Although a Twentieth Century Fox spokesperson declined to comment, 24's expert scowler, Mary Lynn Rajskub, confirms that the clock for Day 7 has been reset. "I don't know what's going on over there, but they're going crazy," says the scene-stealer, who learned only last week that Chloe would be returning. "We usually start [back up] at the end of July, and I don't think we're starting until a couple of weeks into August now. It's kind of exciting, because I think [the postponement] means that they're really having to dig in there and come up with new stuff."
The show's creative team was no doubt already feeling the pressure: Day 6 was considered to be about as explosive as a wet firecracker, so for Season 7 they really needed a plot that was incendiary. In fact, news of the setback comes on the same day the semiannual Television Week critics' poll (in which yours truly participated) named 24 the second-worst show on TV, behind ABC's best-not-traveled October Road.
For more on 24's big rewrite — including what impact it'll have on plans to introduce the show's first female president — check out Ask Ausiello this Wednesday.
Last edited by Rezzo00 (2007-07-23 19:12:04)
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