In the US: Starts Sunday, January 14th 8/7c, Fox
In the UK: Starts Sunday, January 21st 9pm, Sky One.
Characters re-cast: 0
Major characters gotten rid of: 1 so far
Major new characters: Loads. I’ve lost count. They’ll be dead soon, though.
Format change percentage: 10%. Jack!
Mancrush.
It’s a good word, isn’t it? It means the perfectly normal feelings of admiration and envy a completely straight, heterosexual, utterly non-gay man might feel for another completely straight, heterosexual, utterly non-gay man.
Apart from anything else, it’s good because it allows us men to make jokes about feelings we’re not comfortable with – which we all love, right, because manly men like jokes? – and it conjures up far fewer bad thought-scenarios than the phrase “homo-erotic stirrings”.
There are many legitimate targets for mancrushes. Chuck Norris, Steven Segal, Gordon Ramsay: all acceptable. Milo Ventimiglia in Heroes? Absolutely not. That floppy haired girl’s super secret superhero power is empathy, for Heaven’s sake. Real men don’t have empathy – everyone knows that.
Some mancrushes are acceptable at certain times but not at others. It’s perfectly acceptable, for instance, to have a mancrush on Captain Jack in Doctor Who. Under no circumstances is it acceptable to have a mancrush on him in Torchwood. It’s just unnatural at every level.
Then there’s Jack Bauer. Once a time, he was the ultimate mancrush. Any self-respecting man could say he wanted to stay in to watch Jack Bauer, because, you know, he’s just so hard and so dutiful and so stoic… The way he chopped off Chase’s hand and only cried about it later… Let’s face it, he’s just so sway, isn’t he?
But now, the first four episodes of the latest season of 24 have actually called this into question. Jack Bauer has become a girly-man.
