Looking Inside Today's 24 News (or making wild assumptions about stuff I know nothing about, you choose)

You know, I'm always trying to second guess what's going on behind the scenes at Fox's 24 because, among other things, I've been waiting for the show's producers to insert themselves and the show surreptitiously into the 2008 Presidential debate.

I won't recount all that, but you can click here for all my posts about this show, which I will readily admit to you I haven't watched since the pilot, which aired just after the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

And you know the players here include Joel Surnow, co-creator and co-exec producer with Robert Cochran up until the end of season five, and he's big into the Republican noise machine and hangs with Limbaugh and worships at the shrine of the Grover Norquist-advanced drown it in the bathtub and get rid of it school of government.

I've also talked about the casting of Cherry Jones as the US President for the recently postponed 2008 season and what I thought they were trying to do when the conventional wisdom was that Sen. Clinton was the presumptive nominee.

So today, when I saw the news about the prequel movie that they're gonna shoot to bridge the seasons six and seven, what made the bells ring was that they were "bridging the seasons" on the far side of the middle, so to speak.

They don't plan to run this thing until the Fall, possibly in the heat of the final days of what is arguably the most important election in US history.

Really bridging the seasons would happen most efficiently with a May sweeps airdate, and would be a beautiful Monday night complement for the final week of Idol.

But Fox chose otherwise, or might have been told by the producers the project couldn't be finished by then, which could be possible, but who knows. That would certainly be a great way to push the network to a November airdate, however. And it's Fox, after all, and Newscorp has never shied away from putting their corporate nose where it doesn't belong.

And, you know who's back in the fold working on this TV movie, getting a producer, writer and story credit? That's right, Joel Surnow (according to the IMDB page for the movie).

So, what's their plan? What do they plan to say or do in these two hours that could affect the outcome of an election that could happen in the same week (very well could -- if you had a 24 movie, you'd wanna run it during November sweeps, wouldn't you)?

And, should election watchdogs be on the lookout for the airdate or any content from this movie that could sway the electorate?

There IS precedent for this, you know. Remember a little ABC TV movie called The Path to 9/11?

And like I said, I don't watch the show, but not because it's not well done, I just save my thoughts of torture for letters to my Republican congressman and not for the tube.