Can you guys fucking believe that 24 is back on the airwaves in a week? Me neither. It’s been 4 years since the clock on our obsession booped its final beep, and though we were all primed for a movie, I don’t think anyone expected 24 to be resurrected in series form.
There will be some changes. The true real-time concept is out in favour of a condensed 24-hour plotline told in 2-hour, semi-real-time chunks over 12 1-hour episodes. Chloe has shed her awkward, badly dressed skin and been reincarnated as the Wikileaks Geek with the Dragon Tattoo. Jack is a fugitive on the run, wanted by the government. Audrey is no longer in a non-verbal vegetative state and has recovered to become chief of staff to her father, who is now the POTUS. Point of note: if you are a politician and Jack Bauer has saved your ass at one point or another, you are then destined to a) be assassinated b) become President or c) all of the above.
When I first heard about the resurrection of 24, the first thing that sprang to my mind was an interview Roger Waters of Pink Floyd gave about the release of the special edition The Wall Live box set. He described it as something akin to scraping the cash barrel for those last few dollars sticking to the bottom. I said goodbye to the show 4 years ago. We all did. No one expected this. But The Wall Live box set ended up being pretty awesome (even Roger said so), so I’m keeping an open mind.
The second thing that sprang to my mind was, obviously, will there be Tony? I’ve been googling “Carlos Bernard Live Another Day” on the regular for like the last year, and all reports suggest the chances are slim. That being said, David Fury, one of the show’s longtime writers and producers, put out a tweet in December saying he just had dinner with Carlos Bernard and that fans should “read into that what [we] will.” So there is some faint hope that we could see some Almeida. In my mind, if you are going to bring this series back from the dead, you gotta bring Tony and the brotherhood with it. But I long ago learned to lower my expectations on this front, and it very well could be that Fury is merely toying with us. If Tony comes back, I will be ecstatic. If he doesn’t, I’m still going to have fun with it.
When I think about all the years I spent curating this website and producing content for it, and how emotionally invested I became in Tony, in the show and in the discussions on the message forums, looking back it all seems slightly insane. I’m on the wrong side of 35 these days, and being this insane about a TV show doesn’t mesh so well with my evolving idea of myself as a responsible adult and business person. I read some of the stuff I wrote back then and I think “who is this insane person???” It’s whack. But I’ve been here since day 1, literally. I watched the very first episode the very first time it aired live back in November of 2001 and I was hooked, captivated and immediately obsessed. I stuck it out over the years with all my crazy fandom and I’m here til the bitter end. So if the people at FOX want to bring this show back from the dead, I feel a primal desire within also to resurrect the website.
Unfortunately, I’ve had some setbacks. The database for the site got fried at one point or another, which I didn’t realize for a long time because since the show had been off the air for so long, I wasn’t checking on it regularly (or really at all). When I heard the show was coming back, I rushed off to post something and discovered that The Ghost of Victor Drazen had wiped out what amounted to 8 years of my creative life that I could probably never get back. Because I discovered the problem likely long after it happened (though there is no way to know for sure exactly when it happened), there were no usable backups to recover from either. I salvaged what I could through the miracle of WayBackMachine to cobble together something for the premiere of Live Another Day, but unfortunately not every post was archived on WBM, so there are gaps where stuff is missing. The s7 Video Debriefs and most of the episode summaries are still alive, and some stuff from Season 8 as well, I still have all the polls I ever took through the site, but restoring anything beyond that will be a slog and an incredibly time consuming endeavour that I’m not sure will ever happen to completion. Maybe the whole thing is a sign from Almeida that it’s time to forget the past and start over.
The new AIG will pretty much be a straight up blog and I hope to offer at least weekly updates and episode thoughts/reviews, but my days of daily posts and Godlike Moments and transcribing every word spoken by Tony Almeida in every episode and insanely obsessive fandom are over. Kat and I have talked about doing videos for the new season, but we both have a lot on our plates these days and so it remains to be seen whether that will materialize.
If you were a site regular back in the day when the show was on the air, I hope you will come back to share your thoughts, analysis and theories with me once more all the way through Live Another Day. If you’re new to the site, feel free to jump right in. May Almeida Be With You in all that you do!