Watching torture in prime time.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Television

In the same week as the one-year anniversary of Abu Ghraib, an episode of the Fox hit show 24 opened with a scene of the Counter Terrorism Unit medical clinic. Lying in a hospital bed, attended to by physicians, was the terrorism suspect who, in the last seconds of the previous episode, had screamed as the show's hero, Jack Bauer, broke the bones in his hand.

As Fox pumped out advertisements for 24's season finale, the newspapers boiled over with revelations of more real torture by U.S. officers. Then the finale came, and Jack and company saved Los Angeles from a nuclear bomb thanks to a wild series of strategies that included brutal torture.

In the days that followed, Amnesty International issued what amounted to an all-points bulletin for Bush Administration officials: "The officials implicated in these crimes are ... subject to investigation and possible arrest by other nations while traveling abroad." Like Jack Bauer, the 24 star who in the final scene of the last episode flees to Mexico, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush were suddenly wanted men, accused of breaking international law.

Rarely in my days has fictional television seemed so entwined with our national political life.

Unlike most current cop shows, 24 is concerned with crime prevention. In 24, the would-be crimes are so huge and so imminent that the anti-terrorism team believes it does not have the luxury of playing by the rules. Anxiety--which the show manipulates with exaggerated plot twists--explains some of 24's appeal. Among other explanations is 24's proximity to real events and public fears. The shadow of 9/11 hangs over the show. And then there is torture itself, which has a unique power to horrify.

Kiefer Sutherland, an executive producer on the show as well as the star who plays Jack Bauer, seems driven to address the places where his show intersects with American guilt. "Do I personally believe that the police or any of these other legal agencies that are working for this government should be entitled to interrogate people and do the things that I do on the show? No, I do not," he said in an interview with Charlie Rose.

Joel Surnow, also an executive producer, has connected 24's realism with an appearance of conservatism. "Doing something with any sense of reality to it seems conservative," he told the rightwing paper The Washington Times, which praised the show. Surnow also told the paper that 24's writers are both liberal and conservative, that 24 doesn't "try...