24 Television Program

While Americans were looking for a president who could inspire hope, so were the producers of "24." Last season's leaders ran amok, and the show's writers wanted to shake things up with someone who could stand up to Jack Bauer. Fortunately for them, stage veteran Cherry Jones, best known for her Tony Award-winning performance as a stalwart nun in John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt," had just become available.

When Kiefer Sutherland and the crew of Fox's "24" traveled to South Africa earlier this year to shoot the two-hour opener to Season 7, they brought cameras and a hobbyist's enthusiasm for capturing anything that wandered into view. The results -- literally thousands of digital photos -- have been culled into an exhibition that will open Monday at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills.

FROM a cold start, it takes about 75 minutes for Jack Bauer to become \o7Jack Bauer. \f7Fresh off a transport plane from China, where he'd been jailed for almost two years, Jack emerges looking like an early '70s Deadhead. He shuffles his feet, has difficulty looking people in the eye, and we learn that he hasn't uttered a word in two years.

In one of the quickest turnarounds ever for a television show to appear on DVD, Twentieth Century Fox Television today is expected to release the season premiere episodes of "24" less than 12 hours after the popular drama finishes airing. The sixth season of the show starring Kiefer Sutherland as federal agent and terrorist fighter Jack Bauer was launched Sunday and Monday on Fox Broadcasting Network. By this morning, DVDs of the shows will be on retail shelves.

MARY LYNN RAJSKUB'S mother's mother's mother ran a boarding house for Irish sailors. The comedian and actress, born in 1971, grew up in Detroit. For her fourth season on "24" as scowly office-geek superhero Chloe O'Brian, she's been escalated to second billing. She also appears in "American Fork," starring Hubbel Palmer and William Baldwin, which will show at Slamdance in Park City, Utah, this month.

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. has subpoenaed YouTube, Google Inc.'s video-sharing site, to reveal the identity of a user who uploaded four episodes of the TV show "24" ahead of their airing. The subpoena filed Jan. 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California requests that San Mateo, Calif.-based YouTube help identify the subscriber so that Fox can stop the infringing immediately. The subscriber also uploaded 12 episodes of "The Simpsons."

As the cloud of radioactive dust dissipated over Simi Valley, and Season 6 of "24" headed into the lunch hour on Monday night's episode, one wondered why a nuclear bomb had gone off in a major U.S. city and everyone wasn't acting a little more freaked out. But logic aside, the potential of this season instantly became clear with the appearance of a single guest star: James Cromwell as Jack's dad.

Hollywood is notorious for its meetings, but even by L.A. standards this one was unusual. A few steps away from the CTU set of Fox's "24," an unlikely alliance of human rights activists, the dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and veteran interrogators with experience stretching from Saigon to Abu Ghraib gathered around two tables in mid-November.

Halfway through Monday's back-to-back episodes of "24," Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) stormed an apartment full of terrorists without a helmet, got into a deadly shootout and defused an armed suitcase nuke. But close-up shots revealed skin that was both nicely tanned and completely dry. Not bad for a guy who got released from a Chinese prison just hours ago.