24

Fox Buying Carbon Offsets For 24 Car Crashes

7:30AM Defamer Hollywood | Existing to arouse torture-happy conservatives, 24 is going green to stop damaging the world the show is trying to protect. This could be a new plot twist: Jack Bauer realises the global terrorist is himself. More »

The Following Takes Place Between 4pm Tequila Shots and 5 O’Clock Shadows:

7:52AM Kyle Buchanan | What do you get Kiefer Sutherland for his birthday? Apparently, not a transvestite stripper—the National Enquirer says he’s already had one of those. More »

Kiefer Sutherland’s African Safari Doubles as Popular TV Movie

5:33AM STV | Kiefer sighting! 12 million of them, in fact, as Sunday night’s 24: Redemption returned Jack Bauer to sneering, skull-cracking form with modest (at best) ratings. His next appearance is scheduled for January — when 24 returns as a series — or in a heartwarming holiday video, should the inspiration strike this year. [THR] Let’s hear it for Catherine Hardwicke! Her $US70 million weekend for Twilight made it the highest opening gross ever for a woman director. [BBC] Steven Seagal’s law-enforcement hobby is evidently serious enough for A&E to feature him in Steven Seagal: Lawman, a new reality series showcasing the actor on duty as a deputy sheriff in Louisiana. [Variety] After the jump: What actress is set to join the Mile-High Club with George Clooney? More »

Jail-Induced Sobriety a Quaint Lark, Says Kiefer Sutherland

6:11PM Kyle Buchanan | Now that our Kiefer is free as a bird and more velvet-voiced than ever, he’s opening up about the seven-week jail stint that made shower soap negotiation almost as perilous as saving the free world. Speaking to Men’s Vogue, he details the jail’s living conditions (bad, but at least it wasn’t the plebeian hellhole inflicted upon Raffaello Follieri) and the cerebral, mercifully short-lived experience that was his sobriety: More »

5:10AM STV | Free to Good Home: IMDb yesterday uncorked about 6,000 movie and TV titles available for free viewing via Hulu, including recent episodes of The Office, 24 and Battlestar Galactica; site officials also noted that new episodes of some series — 30 Rock among them — will be available in advance of their airdates this fall. Not so with the site’s full-length features, however, which, beyond classics like The Night of the Hunter and Some Like it Hot, include Dude, Where’s My Car?, Liar Liar and The Scorpion King, finally testing the critical consensus that their makers can’t give these films away. We shall see! [IMDb via NYT] More »

7:45AM Defamer Hollywood | Shutdown Fever! Hot on the heels of 24 stopping production to work out script issues, Joss Whedon’s upcoming Eliza Dushku vehicle Dollhouse is grinding to its own quality-mandated halt. Already, Whedon was instructed by a tinkering Fox to shoot a second pilot (the original will air as Dollhouse’s second episode), and the additional order left him too busy to bring future scripts up to snuff. Currently on its third completed episode, Dollhouse sets will go dark for two weeks while Whedon works out the kinks, though Fox claims its midseason debut won’t be affected. Firefly fans, commence your worrying. [Zap2It] More »

3:30AM Defamer Hollywood | At this point, 24’s seventh season has been hit with more obstacles than the beleaguered Jack Bauer — so what’s one more? After suffering through a WGA strike, a one-year delay, and a stint in jail for lead Kiefer Sutherland, the Fox drama is once again shutting down production, says EW. Producer Howard Gordon tells the mag that he was unhappy with the scripts for hours 19-24, so the show will power down until writers can start from scratch. Still, thanks to the eight episodes banked before the strike, producers don’t expect the season premiere to be delayed any further — which is more than can be said for the Lifetime debut of Project Runway, now pushed back to January 2009. Originally slotted for this fall, where it would have followed quickly on the heels of its Bravo swan song, producers couldn’t make the abbreviated schedule work. The delay lends Lifetime the extra time it will need to craft an all-important needlepoint challenge and secure the participation of “fashion legend” Meredith Baxter Birney as final judge at NY Fashion Week. [EW] More »