One of the most anticipated panels of this year’s Television Critics Association press tour was 24: Live Another Day.
It’s been rumoured on and off that the show would return in some form or other but we were all surprised when FOX announced it would be back as a 12-episode limited series rather than a feature film. Yesterday Kiefer Sutherland joined returning cast member Mary Lynn Rajskub and executive producers Evan Katz, Brian Grazer, Manny Coto and Howard Gordon to talk about the revival of the series.
If you don’t want any spoilers for 24: Live Another Day then you’d best stop reading now. If you want all the scoop then please continue.
The key things we learned from the TCA panel are:
- 24: Live Another Day takes place 4 years after the events of season 8 with Jack in hiding but will return with a mission to uncover a secret.
- The show will be mostly set in London.
- Jack and Chloe (Rajskub) will not initially be working together.
- Chloe no longer works for CTU and has turned against them.
- You can expect to see the President and the Prime Minister over the course of the season.
- The show will go into production in the UK in a few weeks and will debut in the US on 5th May with a two-hour episode.
- The new season will still span 24 hours despite only containing 12 episodes. There will be time leaps between episodes.
- The writers are half way through completing the new season.
- Yvonne Strahovski (Dexter) has joined the cast as CIA Agent Kate Morgan who is hunting Jack.
- Audrey (Kim Raver) and James Heller (William Devane) will be back. James will now be the President with Audrey on his staff. Seems that President Logan (Gregory Itzin) could be back too.
- New cast member Judy Davis will be one of the big bads this season. She’ll be playing ‘a woman who married a terrorist who was killed’ and she may be continuing his work.
- Kim Bauer (Elisha Cuthbert) could be returning but not until later in the season.
- Will Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) be back? The panel was coy about that one so we’d say it’s a possibility.
- You need to have seen the previous 8 seasons to understand 24: Live Another Day – it can’t be watched in isolation.
- 24’s return will be nothing like Homeland and is more like The Fugitive.
- The new series doesn’t affect the long-planned movie which would be ‘very, very different’ according to Sutherland.
24: Live Another Day will air on 5th May in the US with the UK return expected shortly after. We can’t wait to see what Jack Bauer gets up to next!
