PCs Are Incorrect on TV
By Leander Kahney
2:00 a.m. Feb. 16, 2002 PST
Hollywood uses a handful of clichés to denote villainy. The bad guys are Nazis, Asians, Soviets or Arabs. They wear black clothing and they speak with accents.
Now there’s a new one: The baddies use Windows PCs.
In Fox’s hit TV show, 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland, the villains use
PCs running Microsoft Windows. The good guys, of course, use Macs.
24 traces 24 hours in the hectic life of counter-terrorism agent Jack
Bauer (Sutherland), who is trying to rescue his kidnapped wife and daughter while simultaneously foiling a plot to kill a presidential candidate. Each hour-long episode unfolds in real-time. The complex, fast-paced show is a surprise hit for Fox, which debuted the show in November.
The action is full of plot twists. Central to the drama is figuring
out the identity of the moles in Bauer’s group; there are traitors in their midst, but no one knows who they are.
No one, that is, except Dean Browell, a Web designer for a small
college in Virginia.
Browell is an avid Mac spotter. He keeps his eyes peeled for glimpses
of Macs on TV and in the movies, and sometimes sends notes about sightings to Web publications MacCentral and Mac Observer.
Watching 24 with his wife, Browell quickly noticed that all the good
guys use Macs, while the antagonists use PCs.
“I made an off-the-cuff remark to my wife,” Browell said. “It was
obvious from the first episode that the assassins use PCs, but Kiefer Sutherland and his gang all use Macs.”
Bauer uses an Apple Cube and a Titanium PowerBook. Most of his fellow
agents use PowerBooks, iBooks or PowerMacs with flat screens, Browell said.
However, after a few episodes Browell noticed that one of the CIA
agents, the trustworthy Jamey Farrell (Karina Arroyave), uses a Dell PC.
“I thought my theory had been blown,” he said. “My wife was quite
entertained when my theory was shot down.”
But in a recent episode, Farrell was exposed as a traitor and
committed suicide, bolstering Browell’s theory. “She was supposed to be the one everyone trusted,” he said.
A character widely suspected of being a traitor -– Tony Almeida
(Carlos Bernard) – uses a Mac, which convinces Browell that his characterization must be a red herring.
Could Browell’s theory be used to unravel the plot? Perhaps. One of
Bauer’s most trusted colleagues, Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke), has just started using a Dell laptop. Browell suspects she will soon turn bad.
“It is really odd,” Browell said. “It almost seems like a visual clue
that was there from the beginning. It would be a really big coincidence if they didn’t put that in there intentionally.”
Naturally, the producers of 24 pooh-poohed the idea of any connection
between computing platform and moral fiber.
“Very clever of you to figure this out,” said writer Michael Loceff in
an e-mail. “But your powers of observation could have carried you a little further. For instance, the bad guys use Nokia and the good guys, Ericsson. The good guys play chess and the bad guys play Go. The good guys eat popcorn and reconstituted soy protein and the bad guys eat red meat. The good guys are on the quarter system and the bad guys on semesters. However – both the good guys and the bad guys read Wired (News).”
Despite Loceff’s sarcastic denial, Hollywood has used this device at
least once before.
In the film Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise plays a government agent
frantically trying to foil a fiendish plot. The bad guys use Windows notebooks, while Cruise and friends use Apple PowerBooks.
24 airs Tuesdays on Fox at 9 p.m.
