Commentary - Aaron Keith Harris: ‘Sleeper Cell’ out-24s ‘24’

Keith Olbermann asked the question on the Jan. 16 installment of his MSNBC program “Countdown,” a nightly exercise in vainglory that makes Bill O’Reilly look like Gandhi.

“24” as everyone knows by now, stars Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, a counter-terrorist agent willing to do whatever it takes to protect America from bad guys. Including — as we have learned so far this season — threatening to rip out his own brother’s tongue and chewing through a terrorist’s neck.

Olbermann objects to the violence on “24,” but not because he’s against violence on television. It’s because the bad guys this season are Muslims who explode a suitcase nuke in Los Angeles, and because the good guys are using violence to keep more bombs from going off.

“It’s a familiar tactic for grabbing and holding the public’s attention beloved by both the Bush administration and, just as another example, Fox News Channel,” said Olbermann. “Step one: Fear. And if step one does not work, step two: More fear.”

“Is it fearmongering? Or is it a program-length commercial for one political party?” Olbermann then asked his guest, Robert Greenwald, director of the Moveon.org documentary “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism.”

“Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” said Greenwald. “But, of course, the fact that the show is on Fox raises all of our eyebrows.”

Neither Olbermann nor Greenwald supplied detail, but we’re clearly meant to believe that Dick Cheney is taking time away from enriching Halliburton to script a hit TV show. Or something like that.

Far from being a pro-Bush vehicle, this season of “24” is overly concerned with trying to present both sides of every political point that comes up.

Scenes involving this season’s president and his advisers are painful to watch. Instead of being part of the drama, the Oval Office is more like a Greek chorus, fretting over what’s going on.

One adviser constantly presses for “suspending certain freedoms” to deal with the terrorist crisis. Another cautions against that.

Then the president says something wise and Barack Obama-like, all in dialogue that sounds like it was lifted from a high school civics essay. Other major characters include the president’s sister as a sassy attorney fighting the FBI’s investigation into Muslim Americans and a ruggedly handsome terrorist leader who, for some unexplained reason, wants to renounce violence and begin peace talks.

It’s hard to imagine what could be done to mollify critics like Olbermann. Maybe the villains could be neo-Nazis. Or Freemasons. Or the Chechen separatists from last season who looked more like that Danish curling team.

In its early seasons, “24” was exciting and unpredictable. Each and every character played a vital role in driving the larger story. Now they just fill time in between scenes in which Jack does something.

The two seasons of the Showtime drama “Sleeper Cell” have succeeded in every way that “24” is failing.

Its hero is a Muslim-American FBI agent working undercover in an al-Qaida cell in Los Angeles. The show’s depiction of the other members of the cell — both domestic and imported — do a better job beginning to explain, without romanticizing, what motivates terrorists than could any TV commentator.

The second season, which first aired in December, features several grim scenes in which an al-Qaida leader is tortured for information, by either U.S. of foreign interrogators.

The moral revulsion it produces is matched by the absolute evil of the victim and the overwhelming need to get the information he has.

I’m still not sure what I think about the real-world use of torture, but I’m given a deeper understanding of it from “Sleeper Cell” than from “24.”

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.