"24" Producer Joel Surnow.
By Jason Apuzzo. The LA Times is featuring an interview today with Joel Surnow, creator of TV’s 24 series. Joel kindly invited Govindini and I to the 24 set a few years back, and at the Fall 2006 Liberty Film Festival we premiered scenes from the pilot of Joel’s comedy show The Half Hour News Hour, a series that later ran on Fox News. The jokey scenes from the pilot featuring Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter got an especially rapturous response, as I recall.
In the interview Joel discusses his forthcoming miniseries The Kennedys that will be showing on The History Channel. That series has already been the source of some controversy, as radical left wing documentarian Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed) and his allies in the media have been trying to portray Joel’s series as a hit job against the Kennedy family. Joel throws a bucket of cold water today on Greenwald’s paranoid speculations, reminding people that the writer of the Kennedys series, Steve Kronish, is actually a liberal Democrat. Here’s Joel on the controversy surrounding the series:
I think part of it [the controversy] was driven by the fact that it’s going to debut around the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s inauguration. For those looking to sustain the Camelot image, they’re worried. But they don’t need to be.
In the interview Joel also talks about setting up his own production entity for the series, and the overall benefits of working independently. We want to wish Joel the best for The Kennedys. Joel’s been responsible for a lot of great TV projects before, whether on 24 on Le Femme Nikita – and we’re sure this one will be colorful, as well. One thing is for certain: whatever one thinks of the Kennedy family, they were an important part of American history in the 20th century – and they’ve certainly never been dull …
Posted on June 17th, 2010 at 12:57pm.
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The left needs to learn just a little more tolerance. They control almost everything on TV and in the movies, but they have to target people like Surnow now and Sarah Palin just for having shows on TV? Talk about hypocrisy. Whatever happened to free speech? Where’s the left’s so-called “tolerance” now of “differing” viewpoints? The only viewpoint they tolerate is their own.
24 took a complete leftward turn the last few seasons, and that’s why it lost a lot of fans. Surnow created it or at least co-created it and yet he couldn’t save it and (had?) to leave.
Joel throws a bucket of cold water today on Greenwald’s paranoid speculations . .
Too bad. If you told the Kennedy story straight up and truthful it would have his lefty fan base chewing the carpet. So I assume that’s not going to be an option.