Then he told them again.
And again.
And again.
They didn’t seem to want to hear it, so they kept asking.
Finally, Sutherland gave up and announced that shooting of the “24” movie would begin in late April.
It was like throwing raw meat to a piranha.
In “Touch,” Sutherland plays a widower and single father who is haunted by his inability to communicate with his 11-year-old son, Jake, who has been misdiagnosed as autistic. Martin discovers that Jake has the ability to see hidden patterns that connect people around the world.
“The character was so vastly different and the tone of the piece was so vastly different that that was part of its appeal,” Sutherland answered the first time he was asked. “And I had to reread it a second time to make sure that all of the emotional components I was reacting to so strongly were actually integral to me as opposed to this perspective that I was trying to create or navigate from ‘24.’ ”
You can see where he went wrong — too many three-syllable words.
“Kiefer, continuing on that point for a minute,” a critic said. “Jack Bauer had to keep his emotions in rein so often. . . . In this one . . . you got to do more . . . outward acting than you got to do in all the years of that. How different an experience is this for you?”
Sutherland answered politely that it was a very different experience, being careful to use more words of fewer syllables. “This will hopefully become more open and more open and more open,” he said.
“Kiefer, in front here, on your left: Being identified with a role is a double-edged sword, and obviously you are happy people bought into it, but you don’t want to be known only for that. So, in taking this role . . . did you feel, ‘I’ve got to get away from Jack Bauer as far as I can?’ ”
Sutherland re-recited his gag about making sure the pilot affected him personally rather than just trying to manage his career, this time winding down with: “Does it happen to also be a nice diversion from ‘24’? Yes. But I believe, honestly, that the choice and the reason that I made the choice was because it spoke to me.”
“I guess, in some way, you are still kind of saving the world, though on a lesser scale, indirectly through your son,” responded one critic, undaunted. “You prevent sort of an unwilling suicide bomber and a major bus wreck in the first episode.”
“Unwittingly,” Sutherland shot back, like he meant it to sting. “I mean, again, the real driving force for my character is to really just simply communicate with his son.”
“I’m curious if, after saving the world and running around in a TV show with a gun and a cellphone, I’m curious if one of the things that appealed to you about this role is that, presumably, you are going to have quite a few fairly quiet, intimate scenes with [child actor] David Mazouz as your son,” said another critic. Now they just sounded like they were baiting him.
About the sixth — maybe it was the seventh — time a critic asked Sutherland about “24,” Sutherland began to talk about how sorry he was that “I really wasn’t very articulate when I answered this question” the FIRST time.
Critics did not take the hint, though at least they started prefacing their questions with “I hate to keep going on about this ‘24’ thing.”
Sutherland tried a new approach: “Touch,” he said, is a show that teaches viewers “that things happen for a reason, very much like the wildebeest that is stung by a bee in the Serengeti, and starts a stampede, and creates a dust cloud that rises and carries over two continents, and starts a storm in the Gulf — and there is a cause and effect to everything.”
Well, that shut them up.
After that, they wanted to know whether American TV viewers are “ready for something that is so positive.”
You betcha, said the panel, which included show creator Tim Kring. Kring, in marked contrast to Sutherland, took only one question, in which he was asked whether the son character on “Touch” wasn’t really a prototype for a character on Kring’s NBC superheroes drama, “Heroes.”
“This is not a superpower idea,” Kring said firmly. “It’s a mystical or spiritual idea.”
More from JJ Abrams
“Alcatraz,” JJ Abrams’s new drama series for Fox, is a “thrilling new series that follows a unique trio investigating the mystifying reappearance of 302 of Alcatraz’s most notorious prisoners and guards, 50 years after they vanished.”
Appearing at the Winter Press Tour on Sunday, JJ, who brought us the maddeningly convoluted series “Alias” and “Lost” and “Fringe,” promised that this time he could be believed when he promised that viewers would get lots of answers to the mystery by the end of the first season and that it would have closed-ended episodes, and no parallel universes.
“This show is designed very much as an episodic show . . . a case of the week.”
Hahahahaha!
Oh, sorry. Where was I? Oh yeah, when some TV critic noted that here we go again with another JJ Abrams show in which a team investigates a mysterious island, JJ shot back that “any land mass is an island. You could argue every show — ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ — is much like ‘Lost.’ ”
Watch at your own peril.
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