Geoff Duncan

Although I'm not as gung-ho as many of the show's fans, I will cop to a passing affection for the Fox "drama" 24, now entering its sixth season with Kiefer Sutherland starring as stone-faced, torture-savvy, heroin-kicking, one-man counter-terrorist strike team known as Jack Bauer.

I put the word "drama" in quotes because, to me, 24 isn't a drama…or even an "action-drama." Let's just call a spade a spade: 24 is a "genre" show, which is a polite way of saying science fiction. Sure, it lacks aliens, spaceships, scarcely-dressed heroines with super-powers, and genocidal robots, but it's got all the other earmarks of a classic sci-fi show like make-believe technology, reality-shifting, time warps, techhobabble, preposterous cliffhangers, a strong mythology which constitutes an alternate reality, and Evil Baddies with seemingly endless supplies of Minions which exist as fodder for Our Hero's and the various pistols, knives, pipes, screwsdrivers, electrical sockets, and bare teeth available to him.

So, despite its many flaws, I inwardly giggle that 24 has put silly sci-fi into pop culture, mainstream entertainment. And I chuckle that the powers-that-be haven't clued in and snubbed 24 for all the industry awards that sci-fi shows never win, no matter how good they may be.

But, mostly, I cackle out loud at all the Canadian actors who appear in 24.

A little background: although born in England, Kiefer Sutherland is Canadian, the daughter of actor Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas. This fact hasn't been lost on Canadian film makers, who tried for years to work out a way for Kiefer to star in a movie about Tommy Douglas, who was the five-time premiere of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and is widely regarded as the father of Medicare, Canada's national health system. So there's some small irony that the actor picked to play a red-blooded take-no-prisoners defender of America and everything it represents has a grandfather who's standing legacy to the world is a (more-or-less) working nation-wide program of socialized medicine.

A little more background: before 24, creators Joel Surnow, Robert Cochran, and Michael Loceff had this little syndicated series on basic cable called La Femme Nikita, loosely based on the film of the same name and starring Peta Wilson. Shot in Toronto, La Femme Nikita is also a silly sci-fi show—er, action-drama—this time with the barely-dressed heroine with espionage superpowers. NIkita bears more than a little resemblance to 24 minus the not-so-real-time clock: the show followed counter-terrorism agents working for the shadowy "Section One" which operates with government sanction outside the law. Nikita relied on lots of not-quite-here realtime surveillance technology, wireless communication, technobabble, preposterous cliffhangers, plot twists, moral ambiguity, lots of death and not-really-deaths, and the sort of espionage and noire conventions which make 24 work. The feel of La Femme Nikita is both lower-budget and much more stylized, relying heavily on titillating sequences with Ms. Wilson and male lead Roy Dupuis' virtually expressionless, cold butchery of Evil Baddies and their associated Minions.

Virtually all of Nikita's major characters have various counterparts in 24, and if you watch the credits for both shows and you'll see a lot of familiar names pop up, including the producers, creators, and composer Sean Callery. And you'll see some familiar faces too: Eugene Robert Glazer, who ran Nikita's Section One for four seasons as the nameless "Operations", turns up as a high-level conspirator at the end of 24's second season. And Alberta Watson played Section One's chief strategist throughout Nikita; she later turned up in 24's fourth season playing one of the (many) heads of CTU.

But even funnier is how 24 has become a bit of a vehicle by which Canadian actors, who don't often catch roles in U.S. broadcast TV shows whether by choice or by fiat, wind up in U.S. living rooms. Here's just a partial list of well-known—or at least, recognizable to me—Canadian talent who have turned up on 24—and this is off the top of my head:

• Wendy Crewson, playing President Palmer's physician/girlfriend in 24's third season.

• Geraint Wyn Davies (who was born in Wales but has lived in Canada since age seven) as an arms broker in 24's fifth season. He's been in a bazillion things forever, including Airwolf and Forever Knight.

• Leslie Hope, who played Jack's soon-departed wife Teri in 24's first season.

• Let's not forget Elisha Cuthbert, who's now thankfully done bearing the brunt of the 24 writing staff's inability to deal with blondes. ("I know—let's have a cougar chase her!") Yes, this means the entire Bauer clan was portrayed by Canadians.

• Roger Cross has a long-running gig playing CTU's battle-hardened, highly-trained go-to man in the field Curtis Manning. Who JAck can knock senseless with an elbow. But then, Jack can knock anyone senseless with an elbow, right?

• Alberta Watson, mentioned above, as CTU head Erin Driscoll. Funny enough, she was also the inspiration for the name of 24's first season character Alberta Green—if I remember, Watson was initially to have played the role.

• Cameron Bancroft, former 90120 and Beachcombers hunk as a CTU operative in 24's fourth season. (If I remember, he dies badly on a rooftop.)

• Mia Kirshner—24's Naked Mandy. 'nuff said.

• Donnie Keshawarz, playing a Middle Eastern intelligence agent, Yusuf Auda, sent to cooperate with CTU in 24's second season. He's eventually beaten to death by a street mob after helping save L.A. from a nuclear blast. Aren't Americans great?

• Peter Outerbridge turns up in 24's second season and gets a kick out of seeing Jack abused. And then gets kicked off himself.

• Lothaire Bluteau, a virus broker in 24's third season.

• Shawn Doyle played the head of CTU's operations at the start of 24's fourth season…and got killed off.

• Tzi Ma—OK, I think he's actually Chinese American, but he turns up in a lot of Vancouver productions ranging from MacGyver to Millennium to a leading role in the recent CBC MOW Dragon Boys. Of course, he's also all over U.S. network TV.

• Kathleen Gati, wife of the Russian president in 24's fifth season.

• Max Martini—OK, he's a U.S. and Italian citizen as well as a Canadian—played a CTU agent in a few episodes of 24's second season. Unfortunately, it was a blink-and-you-miss-it thing.

• The inimitable, charming Carlo Rota, who in addition to playing Chloe's ersatz former shoe-salesman ex-husband in 24's fifth and sixth seasons, is also headlining a Canadian sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie, and hosted the popular (and funny) The Great Canadian Food Show for five years—heck, he was nominated for an award for culinary journalism. The man knows his cuisine. And—guess what?!—he also featured in (I think) all five seasons of La Femme Nikita. Small world, indeed.

But! Tonight, Joel Surnow and the folks responsible for casting the sixth season of 24 have pulled off what might be one of the show's ultimate Canadian casting coups: they've cast Shaun Majumder as a terrorist who gets to push the button on a nuclear device that wipes out a U.S. city—that's a spoiler I'm not supposed to know since the episode doesn't hit broadcast in the U.S. until tonight. So let's just say right before 10 P.M. in Fox's special two-hour block of 24 tonight? Boom.)

For folks who don't know, Majumder is a Newfoundland comedian who currently stars on the Canadian make-fun-of-news and spoof show This Hour Has 22 Minutes; he's perhaps best known for his inept character Raj Binder.

Personally, I always thought Majumder would have a hand in the end of the world.