‘24′ Producer Keeps Track of Ratings “Obsessively”
Check out this article in TV week, it’s pretty cool.
It talks about how executive producer Howard Gordon watches the ratings “obsessively.” Even though 24 was narrowly edged out by Heroes he still felt like the episode fared very well (although it didn’t go into detail about how he felt after being beat by Two and a Half Men).
But, the most interesting stuff is later on in the article. He talked about how this episode was a lot more character development with Jack than anything else.
He’s quoted as saying:
“We’ll see more about Jack’s past and answer some questions about why Jack is Jack.”
He also told the magazine in an interview something that I agree with wholeheartedly
Mr. Ross(TV Week): If you had been a fan of the show for a while, wouldn’t we have known that…maybe Jack had a brother?
Mr. Gordon: Well I think one of the great gifts of “24″ is we only meet people for the course of this one day. We’ve known Jack for six years, but we only know six days of his life. And there are plenty of days that go by without me talking to my brother.
That’s something a lot of us tend to forget. While we have known these characters for so long, we’ve actually only known them for less than a week of their lives. It’s hard to fit your head around something like that.
And remember the days we know them are the really, really crappy days.
January 25th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Yeah, it must be a little tricky trying to dive into the past of a character when you can’t do any flashbacks or memory montages. It really makes the show more like real life - as in you can’t look into the past of people you meet, you just have what they tell you or you see right then. In other words, we’re not given any extra special info before the story begins, it’s only revealed as the story is told. Good way of story telling.I feel this is what The Sopranoes does alot (yeah, I know they go back to explain stuff sometimes) but alot of stuff you just have to pick up. Unlike Lost, who goes back almost every episode, but thats part of the story telling and works great for that.