Tortured advice

LA Times:

Hollywood is notorious for its meetings, but even by L.A. standards this one was unusual.

A few steps away from the CTU set of Fox's "24," an unlikely alliance of human rights activists, the dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and veteran interrogators with experience stretching from Saigon to Abu Ghraib gathered around two tables in mid-November. The group was there to meet with some of the creative forces behind "24," one of television's most successful serialized dramas, famous for its relentless derring-do depiction of an American counter-terrorism unit.

The East Coast crowd didn't fly into town to pitch another quasi-military action series, but rather to advance a simple plea: Make your torture scenes more authentic.

By that, they did not mean bloodier or more savage. Instead, they wanted "24" to show torture subjects taking weeks or months to break, spitting out false or unreliable intelligence, and even dying. As they do in the real world.

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Uhhh, the premise of the show is that it takes place over a 24 hour time period so how do they show torture subjects taking weeks or months to break? Most of the torture scenes are based on the urgency of stopping an immanent attack. I think the format does sometimes become contrived with kidnappings and hostages forcing good guys to act bad etc., but they would have to change the format to 24 weeks to follow the suggestion of the "pros."