That's right, it's 24 time again. For a fairly interesting take on the series from one of the writers, head over to Slate. I'm always annoyed that certain people seem to think that 24 is endorsing

• The Bush Administration
• The use of torture
• Fox News

Okay, maybe they only show Fox News on 24, but that hardly validates the first two points. Besides, if you've watched 24 enough, you've seen that tortute occasionally yields bad information, and that all administrations are capable of mistakes.

The best paragraph, though, comes late:

Slate: As the show has gone on, it hasn't been entirely rigorous about hewing to "real-time" rules. Is it fair to say there's some fudging?

Loceff: That's fair. But to be fair to ourselves, in almost every original script, the timing is actually worked out down to the minute. What happens is that as the scripts are rewritten and re-edited in order to make the story more compelling, you sometimes end up with what you could call a time singularity—where there's no way for everything that happens to happen in real time. It's something that you need to wink at. And we have loosened up, maybe just because the stories got harder to write and because we became more desperate. Especially at the end of the season, when you have fewer episodes to make the story happen, and not all that much time to tell it. That's when it turns out the airport is actually two doors down from CTU.

Good stuff.