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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

"24" only really turned into torture fetish material a few seasons in, though.

Yes. During season one, torture was a rare occurrence and was depicted in a rather morally ambiguous fashion. During the middle few seasons, heroic acts of torture featured on nearly every episode.

Remember also that producers of these shows often do have contact with members of the intelligence and defense communities who serve as official or unofficial advisors, at least so long as the depictions are acceptable to the establishment. Through these advisors, entertainment producers learn about secret programs long before the public. Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty is a particularly prominent recent example of how this works, and why it is a bad thing that results in "entertainment" which is very much a form of propaganda.

Season 2 of "24", which was full of torture scenes, aired a month after the famous "Torture Memos" were distributed, and long before the program was actually implemented. Of course it was written and filmed months before it aired. Your narrative is totally implausible.

Your premise that Season 2 was "full of torture scenes" (it was nothing compared to Season 4) is false. And anyway, the producers of shows like this (i.e. those with messaging deemed advantageously pro-establishment) are rewarded by said establishment by being connected in and obtain insider information.

I don't know whether Season 2 or Season 4 had more torture scenes, but there were enough in Season 2 (see: http://24.wikia.com/wiki/Interrogation) to make it unlikely that the show's general use of torture was not caused by any sort of information leaked by the "establishment." It simply predates the Bush torture program.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are you saying that the producers were rewarded after the fact, for the pro-torture message? And that encouraged them to make Season 4 even more torture filled? What sort of "insider information" did they get?

> Yes. During season one, torture was a rare occurrence and was depicted in a rather morally ambiguous fashion.

Portraying torture as merely "morally ambiguous" is arguably fairly strong pro-torture propaganda by the standards of anything but later editions of 24.

Fair point.

I don't know what happened in later seasons, I only watched the first few. There was torture in the show from Season 1. Jack violently interrogates two people in the first season, later executing one of them at the end of the season. Season 2 opens with a torture scene: http://24.wikia.com/wiki/Interrogation, one of many such scenes in that season.

I don't know how many people here really remember the mood back then. I was just starting college at Georgia Tech when Season 2 of "24" came on. It was hugely popular in my dorm. And the overall sentiment was pretty violent. In the run-up to the Iraq war the next year, it was less controversial to say that we should turn the middle east into a "glass parking lot" than to argue against going to war. And this is of course among people who were relatively liberal compared to the region as a whole.

They also have a torture page (edit: oops, I see now that it is just a redirect to Interrogation):

http://24.wikia.com/wiki/Torture

And an amputation page:

http://24.wikia.com/wiki/Amputation

(but a couple of those incidents don't involve torture; I remember being extremely put off by the scene in day 8 (I guess I switched it off before the scene was complete).

Now I wonder how mainstream 24 really is, given how over the top it seems.

It won 20 Emmy's and was pretty well-rated in its time.

I could/should have said something like "I wonder how prevalent approval for those depictions really is".

IIRC, season 4 was the torture season. It actually laid it on so thick, it became cartoon funny. Pretty sure that season caused some controversy and after that they toned it down a bit.

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