24

Instead, all we can think is: Upgrade the terror alert to red! The one man who has the power to save this great country of ours from annihilation at the hands of terrorists, the one man who stopped at nothing to deliver us from widespread death and destruction countless times before is now watching Barney and fetching juice boxes!

We’ve certainly seen this before. One minute, our friends have thriving careers and active social lives but they can still be counted on for two-hour-long phone sessions concerning the overwhelming obstacles to a consistent hair removal regimen. The next minute, they’re unemployed hermits who can’t talk for more than a full minute without interruption because some small person just shat on the floor or ate something off the ground or a tiny Cinderella doll needs her microscopic glass slippers put on with miniature tweezers.

The point is, little children may bring great joy to the world, but they also make it more likely that a) good female doctors and lawyers and bookstore clerks and waitresses will exit the workplace, leaving far less nurturing ball-scratchers in their places b) countless really scintillating conversations about hair removal will be cut short unnecessarily and c) the free world will be crushed under the hobnailed boots of a ruthless band of terrorists with really bad Russian accents, one of whom always seems to have a graying ponytail (or an “executail” as a friend likes to call it).

Now, naturally we all assumed that Jack Bauer would remain immune to the charms of small children indefinitely. Time was when Jack Bauer would sooner have his fingernails forcefully removed by a mouthbreathing thug with an executail than spend time in the company of a little child. In fact, the Jack Bauer we once knew and loved would happily murder his way through a throng of black-turtleneck-wearing terrorist psychos, biting their faces off and breaking their necks using only his thigh muscles and stabbing them in the jugular with sharpened pencils, just to escape an afternoon with a drooling toddler.

The old Jack is long gone, though, replaced with this sad little half-caf Jack, who takes other people’s feelings into account and looks straight into his own daughter’s eyes when he’s speaking to her. I mean, come on, Jack! What have you become?!

Of course they gave Wilty, Thoughtful Jack a totally lame impromptu assignment: Save the peace-loving president of some country in the Middle East from being assassinated by his brother (who quite obviously isn’t from the same country, let alone the same family). Yes, that’s right, we’re supposed to go from nuclear warheads and deadly nerve agents and biological warfare and dirty bombs to one little half-assed assassination attempt. This is what’s known as devolution: Tune in for the next season of “24″ when Jack saves a really crowded Starbucks from a man with bad gas!

Now, granted, “24″ has relocated to New York City, which means that when we’re treated to more gloomy interiors of warehouses and murky back alleys and dim apartment buildings filled with piles of AK-47s and plastic explosives, we can say to ourselves, “Cool, they’re in New York City right now!” Also, the new and improved NYC CTU offices have really cool computer graphics instead of those sad IBM mainframes they were saddled with back in L.A. Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub) is back, and Kara Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) is even there, grappling with some terrible subplot about a scorned stalker exboyfriend from her white trash past who tracks her to CTU and growls at her until she tosses him the keys to her apartment and warns him, “But you can only stay for one night, ‘kay?” I’m sure that maneuver is straight out of the pages of the Safely Avoiding Stalkers handbook.

Nonetheless, Sackhoff as Sexy Lady Victim Du Jour is the least of our worries. Just when Jack is about to leave CTU to move out to LA with Kim and her dumb husband and their adorable time-suck of a child, just when Jack is saying goodbye and expressing his feelings so openly and honestly along the way that you want to grab him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him (the way he taught us to, in the good old days), along comes last season’s Sexy Lady Victim Du Jour. I’m not naming any names, but suffice it to say that instead of whimpering and gasping at the inherent violence and grotesque nature of every single task involved in saving this great nation of ours from the black-leather-gloved clutches of the terrorists (tasks that she somehow didn’t confront in her training at Quantico or wherever, because now presumably they skip the classes on interrogation techniques involving household appliances and they just grow organic beets and do Pilates), now this Former Sexy Lady Victim lacks affect and has dead eyes, because – pay attention! – she’s dead inside.

Dead inside, people. In case you’re wondering what that looks like, well, you make your face go all flat and you stop styling your pretty, shiny mane of hair, favoring a messier sort of knot that says “I don’t care anymoh-whoa” (even though you’re still carefully applying thick mascara and lip gloss so Wilty Jack might find you well nigh irresistible).

But does Wilty Jack find Dead Inside appealing? Because, let’s face it, Wilty Jack is more like a Sexy Lady Victim Du Jour this season, and Dead Inside is more like Classic, Casually Murderous Jack, which means that Dead Inside is likely to ignore Wilty Jack’s pleading for sanity and mercy, sallying forth heedlessly kicking ass and taking names as necessary to round up plenty of wayward executail.

But we don’t want someone with carefully applied mascara on to save the world! We want Jack Bauer to do it, damn it!

And besides, the world doesn’t even need saving this season. Based on what I’ve seen so far, we’re going to spend the next 24 hours bickering with exboyfriends only to give in suddenly and toss them our keys. We’re going to sit on our hands all season as lukewarm thugs pull lukewarm stunts and lady journalists fall in love with world leaders. We’re going to pick at our fingernails and hope that Chloe eventually gets a promotion.

But it’s not just CTU that’s lost its edge. You know who else is back? President Taylor (Cherry Jones) from last season. Here the problem isn’t mascara so much as a general lack of flair and/or bluster and/or swagger and/or toughness. What I wouldn’t do for good old snakey, slimey President Logan or macho but honorable President Palmer! Because, if you’re going to put a woman in the White House, at least give the role to someone vaguely charismatic, Allison Janney or some Glenn Close type, not a woman who spent the entire seventh season whining unconvincingly about things that were totally wrong and no fair, as if, instead of campaigning relentlessly and sucking up to evil lobbyists and biting the heads off squirrels like any woman destined to lead the free world would have to do to get as far as she had, she’d been shopping at vintage stores and puttering around in her herb garden for the past few decades.

In short, after watching the first four hours, I can tell you that the eighth season of “24″ does not look good. You know how much I adore this stupid show, but please, don’t waste your time. If Dead Inside goes off the tracks entirely or Jack locates his lost testicles or some thug gets bored and pipes poisonous gas into President Taylor’s office, I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, you should really focus on the important things in life.

And hey, when you find out what they are, could you let me know?

If your life is stable, it’s hard not to experience its details as predictable, if not a little mundane. If your life is unstable, it’s hard not to experience its twists and turns as dismaying instead of entertaining or suspenseful. You’re too close to enjoy yourself.

So you mumble distractedly to your co-workers and your family all day long, then weep openly for the fictional heart patient on your TV screen at night.

Jacking around

What’s interesting to me these days is that I still find myself addicted to shows that I have no emotional stake in whatsoever.

Take “24.” Last Tuesday Jack was tortured yet again, the week before that Renee stabbed a man in the eyeball, and yet, there I am, calmly taking it all in, wondering how the writers are going to pull themselves out of this junk heap that they set out for themselves at the beginning of the season.

Why is it so relaxing and enjoyable — so relaxing, in fact, that it often lulls me into a deep and dreamless sleep?

Sometimes I think it’s the predictability of the unpredictable suspense drama that keeps me coming back for more. It’s like my old roommate in San Francisco who came home from work every single night, smoked a big bong hit, and then watched a “Law & Order” rerun. For him, the bong and Sam Waterston were like a wife holding out a martini and a pair of slippers for him when he walked in the door.

Personally, I find the utter flavorlessness of Jack Bauer comforting. I appreciate his complete lack of flair. I like the bland resignation with which he endures yet another Russian thug hanging him by his wrists and applying jumper cables to his nards. While I can recognize, intellectually, that these scenes of torture are depraved and wrong and to repeat them, over and over, is to make torture itself mundane, I can’t get very worked up about it, perhaps because “24″ has already made torture mundane for me, or maybe because “24′s” quaint little terrorist puppet show feels about as far removed from anything menacing or weighty as it possibly could be. Did “The A Team” celebrate vigilantism or criminal misdeeds? Weren’t they technically domestic terrorists? I’m pretty sure that no one got the wrong impression about driving around in a van with your buddies, building homemade bombs, from Mr. T.

It also helps that the people getting tortured on “24″ are usually either a) Jack Bauer, who is about as human-like as a bag of sod, or b) some clownish terrorist with a really bad accent who looks and acts just like every other clownish terrorist who has ever appeared on this twisted neocon flea circus.

Do these non-characters make us immune to the horrors of war? Or do they just provide a sort of modern, surreal Kabuki theater, some odd little stylized fable that teaches us that, no matter how big and scary the world might be, there are men like Jack Bauer somewhere out there, men who stage-whisper in hoarse voices and choke people with their bare hands in order to save our asses from certain destruction. We need not do a thing but sit back and spoon pudding into our empty heads.

No wonder “24″ doesn’t need to be good for me to watch it. It was never really “good” so much as difficult to turn away from in the first place. Sure, there was a time when it made my heart race uncontrollably. I miss those days. Now, most long, long interrogation sessions or intense emotional scenes put me right to sleep. Something about the extreme close-ups, those monotone voices they use, those featureless, empty rooms of CTU: It’s institutional hypnosis.

The only scenes that keep me awake and curious this season are the ones that feature Katee Sackhoff, formerly of “Battlestar Galactica,” who plays Dana Walsh. Dana is a CTU agent with a redneck ex-boyfriend who has pretty much thrashed her whole life simply by showing up at CTU and threatening to reveal her true name (Jen Scott) and troubled past (building homemade bombs in Shaggy’s van?). Dana wisely responded by tossing her ex the keys to her apartment. Next she helps him steal some cash and – whoops! – beat up a cop. Then, once the ex escapes and he’s celebrating with floozies and hard liquor and he’s sure to be passed out or hung over for at least the next 12 hours, what does Dana do? She grabs a gun with a silencer and tracks the ex down, either to threaten him or blow his head off, it’s not clear which. The whole subplot has been so preposterous and tangential to the main story (which isn’t such great shakes itself this season) that I couldn’t look away: It was too delightfully awful. This is the Kim-being-kidnapped-then-chased-by-mountain-lions plot of the season. This role is not doing Katee Sackhoff, whom I love, justice.

But maybe that’s how you can remain addicted to shows long after they jumped the shark. There’s fun in witnessing exactly how ridiculous things will get.

Of course, there’s also the fear that you’re going to miss something really important. Jack probably won’t put the president in a chokehold, but if he does? I need to be there.

Lighthouse hunting

Jacob: Sometimes you can just hop in the back of someone’s cab and tell them what they’re supposed to do. Other times, you have to let ‘em look out at the ocean for a while.

Hurley: Well, next time, how ’bout you tell me everything upfront? I’m not big on secret plans.

I feel you, Hurley. Maybe that’s why “Lost” makes me so impatient. Nonetheless, I feel that it’s my duty, as a guide to the TV world, that I continue to watch in spite of the obvious endless-maze, unraveling-yarn, black-hole, Möbius-strip, tedious-baby-shower nature of this beast.

After all, it is true that on “Lost,” anything at all could happen, anything in the world! And what if I wasn’t watching when it did? Someone else turns into a smoke monster or comes back to life or has a kid that we never even knew existed before, and then what? Hell, Jack could move to Des Moines to start a record shop, Kate could turn purple and start foaming at the mouth, Sawyer could grow wings and big claws and eat everyone’s heads off, Jin could morph into Lady Gaga in patriotic Princess Leia drag with a firecracker strap-on, and I might miss the whole thing!

Because the writers of “Lost” are a lot like John Locke, who keeps brattily insisting that no one should be able to tell him what he can and can’t do. And look, they’re right, because the more ridiculous things get, the more people try to make sense of the ridiculousness. If reading this gigantic list of theories about “Lost” doesn’t make your head hurt — and no, not because it’s an elaborate, thoughtful riddle, but because it’s a big, jumbled mess of interconnected nothingness — then you have a lot more patience for chaos that can only end badly (like life itself, dude!) than I do.

No, no, say the show’s die-hard fans, it all adds up to pure brilliance, with numbers and mirrors and alternate realities! But ask any actual screenwriter or fiction writer or seasoned storyteller, and he or she will agree: There is no glorious final answer that can justify pulling a deus ex machina out of your ass every other episode.

Giving your lead character a kid that no one knew existed before is just a little bit like bringing dead characters back to life (Locke, Jacob, Sayid) or traveling through time or making the island disappear or creating an alternate universe to flash to because flashbacks and flash forwards had been exhausted. Now, of course, fans are going wild with speculation over the “new” timeline of this alternate world, when it started (1977?), and who Jack’s alternate-universe wife might be. Juliet? Linda Carter? You know, I bet when Carly Simon whispered “David” backward in the new version of “You’re So Vain,” she wasn’t referring to David Geffen at all, but was referring to Jack’s musically talented son David, who’s obviously going to travel back in time, become a record executive, and screw up Carly’s career but good! And remember Carly’s 1976 album was called “Another Passenger”? Oh my god, I’m blowing my own mind here!

Yes, yes, I know, David exists in the alternate timeline universe, and naturally there are no rules guiding that universe because what fun would that be? Maybe he only exists in the mirror or in Jacob’s mirror-mind or maybe he’s from the planet Zornular (where Michael and Walt were beamed before the tanker exploded) and he comes bearing a message about good and evil. You know, it’s all about mirror worlds and redemption and the lighthouse is religious but the temple represents secular man’s ability to enact miracles on earth without God, but smoke monster and Claire are forces of evil who are looking for “candidates,” sort of like the GOP except with trekking through the jungle aimlessly where prattling on about healthcare reform aimlessly should go.

Look, there is actually a difference between an elaborate, multitiered maze created by a mathematical genius and an enormous, tangled mess of scrap metal dumped there by someone who read a few Wikipedia entries on chaos theory and quantum mechanics and thought they were seriously cool. When thousands of people are picking through the scraps while playing make-believe that they’re in some wise and complex microcosm filled with deeper meaning?

Well … it’s strangely fascinating, isn’t it? To watch, week after week, as the world scrambles and strains to sift through a junk heap? And to think, without the Internets, we’d never have such a front row seat to the ease with which the populace is drawn into a giant narrative roach motel.

Addictive, silly, and yet, oddly calming. It’s not a guilty pleasure because there’s no guilt and even less pleasure. Like staring into a washing machine as it spins, the repetitive nothingness of “24,” “Lost” and so much of current popular media and culture offers a means of coaxing us out of our rage and disempowerment and into a state of soothing indifference.

And it takes about two weeks to adjust to being back at work. I tried to explain this to my husband yesterday: The mind doesn’t want to do a job. The mind wants to go to the mall and gaze at the intricate, almost balletic movements of the hot-dog-rolling machine at Orange Julius. The mind wants to take a nap. The mind wants a doughnut.

My husband had to run. He had stuff to do. The mind felt jilted. But the mind thought that some stale gingerbread cookies might take the mind’s mind off how jilted it felt.

Brand new menu!

But don’t feel too bad, my fellow struggling, slow donkey friends, because the winter season of television is upon us, and it’s about 50 trillion times more exciting than the fall television season was.

Why do they hold out on us like this? Network executives should make it official and shift all the best shows to January, and then I can spend September and October writing rambling essays about napping and fat donkeys and really good cheese instead of making elaborate charts detailing all of the shitty shows none of us want to watch anyway, because they suck ass. (After a long-but-not-long-enough vacation, the mind is drawn to vulgarity — and things that are filled with custard.)

A bunch of new shows are about to flicker onto your TV screens in the coming weeks, shows that are so fresh and delectable, they might as well be filled with custard. My top three favorites so far? I’m so glad you asked.

1) Fox’s “Lie to Me” (Premieres 9 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 21) Starring Tim Roth as a “deception detection” specialist, this show is like a mix between CBS’s “The Mentalist” and Fox’s “House”: There are lots of creepy, “How did he know that?” expert moments, just as cheesy and delicious as they are in Simon Baker’s hands, but with an edge. Unlike blue-eyed Baker, who’s soft and pretty and truly belongs among the filtered lenses and ample-breasted ghost-soothers of CBS, Roth is sort of beady-eyed and unlikable — you know, how you’d imagine a Fox executive might look, if you were barreling toward him in your car at night. Something tells us that Roth’s character, Cal Lightman, has seen more than his fair share of big, fat lies and the lying liars who tell them. But Lightman doesn’t wallow like Hugh Laurie’s Dr. Gregory House does. No way, he’s more chipper than that. Plus, he has a sexy sidekick (Kelli Williams from “The Practice”) and some sexy underlings who flirt with him and each other — you know, anything to keep the whole picture funny but edgy, upbeat but heavy. Think “Bones.” Think “Fringe.” This is the signature flavor of Fox: salty, greasy goodness in every bite, and no one can eat just one. This network knows how to get us hooked. Which leads us to my second favorite new, exciting show of the winter season …

2) Fox’s “Dollhouse” (Premieres 9 p.m. Friday, Feb. 13) Yes, we’ve all been waiting for Joss Whedon’s new sci-fi drama, about a bunch of hot people who have their memories erased so that they can act as anonymous agents for a high-end firm that provides fantasy dates, secret missions of various kinds, hostage negotiations … It’s not entirely clear what goes down at the Dollhouse or who runs it or how they got started or whether they’re good or evil, and that, my dear, is the custard filling in this big, sugary doughnut of a drama. If you take off the rose-colored, Joss Whedon-loving glasses, of course, you’ll notice that the first episode of “Dollhouse” is a little bit dorky and uneven at times. But Eliza Dushku fills that “Buffy”-esque dazed-but-sharp babe quotient nicely, and I guarantee that after the first episode, you’ll want to see more, more, more, more, as soon as you can. Personally, I can’t wait for this show to kick into high gear. Weird, witty, smart, suspenseful, intense? This is what we spent the fall TV season hungering for. That, and something that might actually make us laugh, which brings us to my favorite of them all …

 3) Showtime’s “The United States of Tara” (10 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 18) Yes, it’s a good old-fashioned multiple-personality dramedy starring Toni Collette and John Corbett, written by indie wunderkind/stripper scribe, Diablo Cody, she of the whimsically made-up name and the funky hairdos and the gloriously quirky personal style, the likes of which Hollywood shuns (at first), then clings to like a big, milky, life-giving breast. As bored as we all are with Cody’s plucky rise to greatness, this woman does have a fiercely original voice and is far from a flash in the Sundance-welded pan. “The United States of Tara” takes a nearly ridiculous premise (Mom with debilitating personality disorder tries to live a normal life off her mind-numbing meds, forcing her family to interact with three incredibly demanding “alternate” personalities) and spins it into comedic gold. Of course, the whole thing might be cringe-inducingly awful without Toni Collette, who is just outrageously, breathtakingly good at playing four different characters wrapped into one. On top of that, the teenage daughter has great comic timing (how rare is that?), the teenage son is also wickedly funny, Rosemarie DeWitt is — well, she’s Rosemarie DeWitt, she’s the greatest (Go see “Rachel Getting Married” if you haven’t yet). John Corbett (as Tara’s husband) is low-key and bland as always, only in this setting, he’s the perfect foil for Tara’s three-ring circus. I’ll write more about this one next week, but in the meantime, program your DVR. You can’t miss it.

Ah, three promising new shows. Can you believe it? It’s enough to wake you from that post-holiday stupor once and for all.

Welcome back-tica, Galactica!

But those three are just the tip of the iceberg, what with so many returning favorites flying at us in a matter of days: “24″ (8 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 11, on Fox), “Damages” (10 p.m. Wednesdays on FX), “Friday Night Lights” (9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16, on NBC),”Battlestar Galactica” (10 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16, on Sci Fi), “Big Love” (9 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 18, on HBO) and “Flight of the Conchords” (10 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 18, on HBO). How will we juggle them all?

After waiting a year and a half, the new season of “24″ would excite me even if Jack Bauer sat down and ate a ham sandwich for the first hour, then called a few old friends on his cellphone while window shopping for pocket-size explosives and torture devices during the second. Instead, Jack is pulled into the usual web of terrorist manipulations and high-level conspiracies. The first four hours of the “24″ premiere offer the usual Mister Toad’s Wild Ride of absurd, spectacular and goofy twists and turns, of course. Just suspend your disbelief from the start (a prerequisite when watching this show) because this season’s big conceit — from the players involved to the nature of Jack’s involvement ­– is more fantastical than ever. But that’s what we want from “24″ –­ pure, unfettered, neocon fantasy, softened by the addition of a female president who, unlike most presidents to date outside of “The West Wing’s” Jed Bartlet, actually seems a little unnerved by reports of genocide in small African nations.

Onward: I can already strongly recommend “Friday Night Lights,” of course, having watched most of the season on DirecTV this past fall. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s definitely worthwhile, a far cry from the melodramatic and repetitive second season.

Meanwhile, the second season of FX’s “Damages” looks even better than the first. (Wrote about it here last week.) And the final 10 episodes of SciFi’s “Battlestar Galactica” are almost guaranteed to range from intense to mind-blowing –­ the Galacticans have landed on Earth and it’s a crusty, blackened mess with not a single water park or Australian-themed steakhouse left standing. What fresh hell awaits our intrepid, booze-swilling colonists?

Finally, “Big Love,” which bored me to tears in its second season, really gains momentum during its third season, with a bunch of unfamiliar new challenges facing Bill and his three wives. It’s always a little tough to get back into this show. “Who are these bad people with their dozens of children and their bad hair, and why should I care?” I find myself wondering. But by the third episode, the new season reaches critical mass, plotwise and emotionally.

Oh, the places we’ll go! At long last, after a dreary, draining fall, there are so many good shows to write about, I can barely tackle them all. But for now, it’s back to bed with a box of custard-filled doughnuts and the first two episodes of A&E’s “The Beast.” Who says the holiday spirit can’t live on inside every one of us?